Jade Raymond is once again leading a studio and is “hard at work on an unannounced IP” for PlayStation. Please let her actually launch this game.
According to the PlayStation Blog, Raymond will be heading up a new independent Montreal-based studio called Haven. There she has assembled a team of game developers from her decades of experience in the industry “to create games that are a haven for players.”
Raymond has had a long and storied career in games. Originally a programmer at Sony, Raymond moved on to Electronic Arts where she helped make The Sims Online, before eventually joining Ubisoft and leading development on the first Assassin’s Creed title. In her tenure at Ubisoft she also oversaw the production of Watch Dogs.
Eventually Raymond moved back to EA in order to lead a new studio called Motive and develop Star Wars games. One of those games was Project Ragtag, a much-anticipated third-person action game being developed by Uncharted creator Amy Hennig at Visceral Studios, a now defunct subsidiary of EA. Unfortunately the game never came to light and neither did anything Raymond worked on before eventually moving on to Google, where she led development on first-party games for Stadia until Google shuttered their internal studios earlier this year.
Announcing her departure from Google just ahead of this news, there has been much speculation about where Raymond would eventually land. Her time in games has definitely been a rollercoaster, and she acknowledges that in her post, sharing that, “Some of these adventures have been more successful than I could have ever imagined, and others less so.”
It’s worth noting that while Raymond’s studio Haven is developing an IP for PlayStation, they are independent and not owned by PlayStation outright. Now let’s please hope that this new IP actually sees the light of day.