An Audience with...Jade Raymond

How EA’s head of Star Wars went from programmer to producer, founder and studio manager.

- Nathan Brown

Jade Raymond has done something few others in the game industry ever have: built studios for two of the largest publishers on the planet. The first, Ubisoft Toronto, this month stars on its first Edge cover. Her second, EA’s Motive Studios, is now beavering away on a new IP. Ahead of her keynote at the Develop Conference in July, here Raymond shares her thoughts on what makes a good videogame studio, the future of the action-adventure, and what the industry still needs to do to become as diverse as its players.

Building a studio isn’t just about staff and infrastructure; you’re building a culture, too. What’s your philosophy for that? 

To be able to build a team, and put together a studio where you build a culture where you create kind of a place where people can do their best work, is supermotivating to me. I just feel really lucky to be doing that a second time. And with Motive, I really wanted to take a different approach; I really believe that games have gotten to a place these days, on large productions, where often individuals don’t get a chance to have their own kind of creative input on the game. So one of the big objectives was to create a studio that could be creatively led. The studio name is about tapping into people’s personal motivations for being in games, and creating something really special together.