Jade Raymond has left PlayStation's Haven Studios

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yurinka said:
Seems you have no idea about her long career, her many big achievements and what who worked with her or for her say about her.

Before joining Ubisoft was producer of The Sims Online, which back then was super innovative and very successful. As producer she turned a failed PoP game into Ubisoft's most important and best selling IP, Assassin's Creed. She turned a failed Driver game into Ubisoft best selling new IP (which also broke some records of new IP sales as I remember in Europe) and as I remember Splinter Cell Blacklist.

Then she did stop working as game producer (so did stop working directly in games) and became an executive, was in charge of Ubisoft's new IPs when they started to work on stuff like The Division (broke also the record of best selling IP as I remember or was going to do it but Destiny got released around that time and got the record), The Crew, For Honor (you may not like these two but are very successful) or some of the small ones as I remember Valiant Hearts and that other small one with the little girl.

Was tasked on creating and leading Ubisoft Toronto, quickly grew the studio and became to work in multiple very successful AAA games at the same time both as lead or support team (a few mentioned ones plus other ones I don't remember like some Far Cry games).

Later EA hired her as SVP to create and lead Motive, which was quickly built and where made Star Wars Squadrons and Dead Space remake, a new IP that I think got cancelled after she left, and also when arrived got tasked to help saving the failing (before release) Battlefront II, in particular I don't remember which area of the game (MP maybe?).

Then Google hired her as VP and tasked her to build Stadia's first party games team. Quickly started to build a AAA team, started to publish some 2nd party games but before they were ready to publish their first internal AAA game the team was shut down by Google.

Once it happened, in less than 3 months she founded Haven hiring a good chunk of the AAA team they had at Google plus ex-Motive and ex-Ubisoft and send 3 pitches to Sony. Sony wanted them to make all 3 but Haven to start doing only one of them. Shortly after got praised by Cerny and Hermen because they were progressing ahead of schedule and with a their own development technology they built that was very useful and innovative to help boost gamedev productivity.

Everybody praise her as a great problem solver and team leader, plus her ability to build new, huge and very productive and successful multi-team AAA studios.


She was the producer of the game. That role isn't creative, it's the person that manages the team that develops the game, taking care of the budgets and reaching milestones, making sure everyone has their tasks done, that solves the issues that may appear between the different teams involved and guides the team to complete and release the product, hopefully being a successful one.

One of these many people managed by the producer is the creative director, who is in charge of the creative/game design/narrative part of the game (not tech, not marketing, not production, etc). The creative director of that game was Patrice Desilet, who also was the main source of the lack of direction of the failed Prince of Persia game they were developing and was a mess that was going to be cancelled.

The game had changed too much from Prince of Persia games, so changed the producer putting her there and asked them to try to fix it and to turn it into a shippable new IP. With her not only fixed it to the point to turn it into a shippable game, it became their most successful new IP ever, and the most important IP of the company.

After Assassin's Creed, as I remember all he shipped -as creative director- is a game about monkeys that nobody played. She instead worked as (producer and later studio head or executive producer) in countless super successful AAA games and new IPs, built and leaded different teams and studios, etc.

None of them were the 'creators' of big AAA games. They were just part of huge teams who created them, each person in their role in charge of different things equally important.

P.S.: I didn't work with any of them, but met both personally. Both felt cool and very talented persons each one in their own stuff.
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This right here should be the pinned comment. It beings a much needed nuance to the subject and gamers are pulling out their PS3-era hateboner to the "female" developer for not creating the next Assassins Creed. There is a lot of ignorance here is to what a producer / creative director does and once again, attacking her on things out of her scope. By this logic we should blame Mark Cerny for creating the PS5 which cause all these disastrously delayed and poorly received games just because.
 
Why isn't Herman gone yet. Didn't he and Jim approve all of this gaas shit. Great job they be doin there at PS studious. Just coasting off of ps4 success.
 
viveks86 said:
Wait, have you done a full 180 on Hermen? Quite the change in opinion over the months!
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I always tell people that I call balls and strikes. Objectively, he's failing.

I first criticized him when he failed to put out a showcase for the PS5 Pro and a second half roadmap for the PS5. I've also criticized him for the decrease in quality among PC ports. The rushed Until Dawn remake and a total lack of transparency on future titles. Their inability to better utilize legacy IP and a pretty bonkers GaaS strategy.

But Marathon and Fairgames are both catastrophic, which tells me that Hermen is asleep on the wheel. It also suggests to me that all these projects that they refuse to show are beyond "not ready" but are also catastrophic.

Punished Miku said:
They clearly don't have anyone better right now that can work with both the east and west side and knows the company culture.
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I think Nicolas Doucet would also be a great option, but greedily, I want him at Asobi cooking. But you think about what he or Neil could bring to a global level and either would be really impressive.
 
Ozriel said:
Why's she always leaving these studios?
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Might not want to be related to a flop. And she's kinda succeeding on that, she's still talked about as the creator of Assassin's Creed, and that was awhile ago.

Or maybe she just enjoy starting studios.

She's soon 50 too, might have some career goals that is driving her toward new things all the time.
 
What did she ever do, really?

Wasn't she the creator of the original Assassin's Creed? That game instantly turned me off of the franchise.
 
Her and Amy Hennig just never releasing games for a decade at this point, I have very little confidence in 1943 being close to ready when they delayed it this year WITHOUT EVEN SHOWING IT.
 
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I think at this point she better just quit game dev. So many wasted years she could've probably spent on something more important in her life or start a new career not related to video games at all.
 
PauloRoberto said:
When was the last time she delivered something ?! (without any innuendos, i just read that she is leading X, then she is leading Y and never see any results!)
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Has she ever? Assassin's Creed was the one and only time she was, in one way or another, involved in a good AAA title and I still have some doubts she made a difference back in the day.
 
tmlDan said:
Her and Amy Hennig just never releasing games for a decade at this point, I have very little confidence in 1943 being close to ready when they delayed it this year WITHOUT EVEN SHOWING IT.
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It's interesting when you look at Glassdoor because it was all koombaya in the reviews at Haven, which always had me a little puzzled.

I managed a team and they absolutely fucking hated me, but I got fantastic results. I'd get a ton of complaints about not being nice enough or being too tough on them. The previous manager of the team asked nothing of them, had terrible numbers, and they praised him as the best manager they'd ever had.

Sometimes when reviews from employees are too positive, that's a red flag of its own.

Making games is hard work, it's for the passionate who are willing to sacrifice work/life balance in many ways.

Here are some choice takeaways from the reviews at Haven

  • extremely knowledgeable team, and not a shred of inflated ego to be found across the board
  • flexible and accommodating work practices
  • everybody has powerful laptops enabling us to work from home efficiently, and transfer to physical cowork space easily.
  • Keep on keeping the jerks out of Haven!
  • Very experienced team, but simultaneously completely ego-free - which is rare in this industry
  • Great work life balance

So let's start with ego, ego sounds bad on the face of it, but ego isn't inherently bad. It drives thinks like perfection and belief in a vision. Ego is where people fight for what they think is important as opposed to just relenting on everything to keep this copacetic. This is why you see success in people like Druckman and Kojima. Just look at the time Naughty Dog spent getting that e3 trailer up and ready to go and how bad the fairgames and marathon trailers were. No one in the room is standing up and say, "this isn't it" there is no voice loud enough in the room pushing back.

That kind of goes with the line about no jerks at Haven. And I'm not saying you need to be a jerk, but it is what that line might actually mean. At the end of the day it's about perception. Strong personalities can come across as being a jerk, but you need strong personalities to guide projects. You just have to have it. If there is no friction within a creative project, it's probably not going to be good.

Not saying that there can't be a work/life balance, but sometimes you have to go heads down as a team on a project and get deliverables. They've shown one cgi trailer in over 4 years... that's not good production. Having everyone working from home, but not getting deliverables... that's bad management. Letting everyone work from home 9-5 and not asking anyone to deliver anything on time can absolutely get positive reviews from employees but it's not going to make a good game and the people won't thank you when they lose their jobs.
 
tmlDan said:
naw, just dont think people really care, whats there to care about? lol
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i was just wondering; back in the day where Xbox was more of a thing and bad news like this came out, it was very common to see people saying things like:

"this happens all of time"
"you are just a hater"
"media is bias"
etc...
 
yikes :messenger_grimmacing_

Draugoth

Rumor  Thread 'Sony reportedly very confident with Jade Raymond's Fairgame$'

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One of the company's upcoming titles is Fairgame$, a multiplayer extraction game developed by Jade Raymond, former producer of Assassin's Creed. Although we still don't have much information about the project, it seems that internally it's going well.

The information came from Chris Dring, a journalist for the Games Industry portal. According to him, internal talks at Sony about Fairgame$ are very positive, with the studio committed to making the game...
  • LOL
  • Like
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  • Praise the Sun
  • Empathy
 
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For the love of god Sony, please just can Fairgame$ already. It's just gonna be another complete failure. Nobody wants that shit.
 
I asked chat gpt to write a rap song about jade career but it gave up after 3 rhymes...

Holefully we get an onlyfans page before she get too soggy.
 
I don't understand how a producer made such a name for herself, when they have nothing to do with the creative process.
She produced a couple good games during the golden age of Ubisoft and that's it.

Imagine hearing that the bookkeeper of X game has now joined Y studio.
How fascinating!
 
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Can't imagine them lasting much long.

Unless they see something really special in the game, shut it down now and save everyones time.
 
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some quotes by hermen hulst and jade raymond after the studio was acquired by sony=
hermen👇
"You're right, we could have just carried on in the capacity of them being an external development partner," acknowledges PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst. "But what Haven has created is so exciting for us, there was just a desire to deepen that relationship. We have been very impressed with how Haven is coming together.
"It's really exciting for our central services and technology groups. For these to be working with a world class outfit like Haven... that's great. And it is aligned with the strategy of diversifying the kinds of games we are offering to our fanbase."
jade👇
"This [acquisition] is what I would have ultimately hoped for in my dreams. You talked a bit about a dating period and then getting married, but we did have a year of dating, where we worked really closely with Connie [Booth, SVP and head of internal production] and Hermen, and all the teams at Sony. We got to see what they have to offer and how they work. The [Haven] team continues to feel like this is the best experience that we've had in our careers. It's been amazingly collaborative, with so many talented people to work with and inspiring studios to exchange ideas with. The team felt like we could really make the best quality game if we were part of the PlayStation family.
For Haven, Raymond says that Sony has lived up to its reputation of giving developers "the latitude to make the games we are dreaming of making."
"PlayStation has its own unique secret sauce to getting to those amazing games. It's not by chance that you see so many 90+ blockbusters [from Sony]. It's because they do something a little differently, and that's been the thing that we've experienced over the last year."

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images
 
She was with Ubisoft in one of their most creative periods. But since then she barely made anything. So one has to wonder if she was already back then just the face that was pushed forward for marketing purposes and ever since deceived every new employer about her active role and success, maybe even conveniently deceived herself and sold an image of herself that never was true.
 
yurinka said:
Seems you have no idea about her long career, her many big achievements and what who worked with her or for her say about her.

Before joining Ubisoft was producer of The Sims Online, which back then was super innovative and very successful. As producer she turned a failed PoP game into Ubisoft's most important and best selling IP, Assassin's Creed. She turned a failed Driver game into Ubisoft best selling new IP (which also broke some records of new IP sales as I remember in Europe) and as I remember Splinter Cell Blacklist.

Then she did stop working as game producer (so did stop working directly in games) and became an executive, was in charge of Ubisoft's new IPs when they started to work on stuff like The Division (broke also the record of best selling IP as I remember or was going to do it but Destiny got released around that time and got the record), The Crew, For Honor (you may not like these two but are very successful) or some of the small ones as I remember Valiant Hearts and that other small one with the little girl.

Was tasked on creating and leading Ubisoft Toronto, quickly grew the studio and became to work in multiple very successful AAA games at the same time both as lead or support team (a few mentioned ones plus other ones I don't remember like some Far Cry games).

Later EA hired her as SVP to create and lead Motive, which was quickly built and where made Star Wars Squadrons and Dead Space remake, a new IP that I think got cancelled after she left, and also when arrived got tasked to help saving the failing (before release) Battlefront II, in particular I don't remember which area of the game (MP maybe?).

Then Google hired her as VP and tasked her to build Stadia's first party games team. Quickly started to build a AAA team, started to publish some 2nd party games but before they were ready to publish their first internal AAA game the team was shut down by Google.

Once it happened, in less than 3 months she founded Haven hiring a good chunk of the AAA team they had at Google plus ex-Motive and ex-Ubisoft and send 3 pitches to Sony. Sony wanted them to make all 3 but Haven to start doing only one of them. Shortly after got praised by Cerny and Hermen because they were progressing ahead of schedule and with a their own development technology they built that was very useful and innovative to help boost gamedev productivity.

Everybody praise her as a great problem solver and team leader, plus her ability to build new, huge and very productive and successful multi-team AAA studios.


She was the producer of the game. That role isn't creative, it's the person that manages the team that develops the game, taking care of the budgets and reaching milestones, making sure everyone has their tasks done, that solves the issues that may appear between the different teams involved and guides the team to complete and release the product, hopefully being a successful one.

One of these many people managed by the producer is the creative director, who is in charge of the creative/game design/narrative part of the game (not tech, not marketing, not production, etc). The creative director of that game was Patrice Desilet, who also was the main source of the lack of direction of the failed Prince of Persia game they were developing and was a mess that was going to be cancelled.

The game had changed too much from Prince of Persia games, so changed the producer putting her there and asked them to try to fix it and to turn it into a shippable new IP. With her not only fixed it to the point to turn it into a shippable game, it became their most successful new IP ever, and the most important IP of the company.

After Assassin's Creed, as I remember all he shipped -as creative director- is a game about monkeys that nobody played. She instead worked as (producer and later studio head or executive producer) in countless super successful AAA games and new IPs, built and leaded different teams and studios, etc.

None of them were the 'creators' of big AAA games. They were just part of huge teams who created them, each person in their role in charge of different things equally important.

P.S.: I didn't work with any of them, but met both personally. Both felt cool and very talented persons each one in their own stuff.
Click to expand...

Very insightful post. More people need to read this.
 
> Fairgame$
> 1 video that was controversial and no updates till now
> Renamed to Fairgames
>"heist-style online shooter" releasing in 2026,
> GTA 6, also releasing in 2026 which is also a heist-style (online) shooter

bruh, even I would jump especially if I was an executive.
 
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All the best to her.

Sure, she got rich off the studio acquisition deal with Sony. So, she can probably afford to relax a bit and then pick and choose her next creative endeavour.
 
What's her track record? Did she do anything worth remembering?
I only read her name once in a while but can't connect any games projects to her
 
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Mibu no ookami said:
So let's start with ego, ego sounds bad on the face of it, but ego isn't inherently bad.
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Nothing is inherently bad - but if you put a group of high-performing egocentric people in a room and expect results (let alone good results) - I... have this bridge in Manhattan you'd be really interested in.

Mibu no ookami said:
It drives thinks like perfection and belief in a vision.
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The auteur led projects work(some of them) because one ego unifies people behind them, there's no room for multiple such forces (and they get quickly eliminated if they think otherwise - see what happened in Id software multiple times over when JC was still there).
That said - even in success stories - it's not just a case of leaders who are stubborn - they balance that with other qualities as well.

Mibu no ookami said:
If there is no friction within a creative project, it's probably not going to be good.
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I call BS on that - the best project I've ever shipped was also the one with by far the least personal drama on it. Not saying 0 - because there's never 0, but the notion that quality requires conflict and bullying from the top is quite frankly nonsense.

Now all that said - we have no idea how Haven was actually managed, and what exactly is going wrong/right, and I'd rather not speculate. The most dysfunctional environments I've been in have not been exposed about it for decades(or sometimes - never), so I wouldn't pretend public discourse is particularly good source of info. Even Mr. Schreier misses most of these stories.

Mibu no ookami said:
They've shown one cgi trailer in over 4 years... that's not good production.
Click to expand...
Probably - but we really don't know the reasons for it. Lots of projects that are in continuous death-march mode (so little to no work-life balance at all) also fail the same way(by having nothing to show for years on end) - so assuming lack of deadline enforcement as 'the' cause with how little we know, is reaching quite a bit.
 
From a layman view this is strange.

She sets up a studio, announced a project and then leaves before the project even goes public. This doesn't really instill confidence in Fairgames.
 
The entire creative leadership at Sony needs a shakeup. Hulst needs to get shoved back into managing Guerrilla games and stay there. That guy was an ill chosen candidate from the get-go. GG's games mostly rode on the coattails of PS brand name recognition.

I still can't fathom what the fuck Ryan was thinking with that appointment.
 
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The game was dead when they officially first showed it.

There was never anything ever to grab onto other than it looked like some sort of extraction game made with the worst parts of watch dogs
 
Hypereides said:
The entire creative leadrship at Sony needs a shakeup. Hulst needs to get shoved back into managing Guerrilla games and stay there. That guy was an ill chosen candidate from the get-go. GG's games mostly rode on the coattails of PS brand name recognition.

I still can't fathom what the fuck Ryan was thinking with that appointment.
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Jimbo was trying to find someone even worse than him, it was a mission impossible but somehow he succedeed.
 
I can't tell if this is her bad luck or a reflection on her at this point. Going to be a wild story.

Be wild if this game got canned.
 
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