Longtime industry veteran Jade Raymond is heading up a new studio that will create original games for PlayStation. Raymond announced the news today via the PlayStation Blog. “We want to create worlds where players can escape, have fun, express themselves, and find community,” Raymond wrote about the new studio, Haven. “We want to pour our passion into a project. We want to make something wondrous for people to experience.”
Raymond is one of the game industry’s most prolific developers; her career’s spanned major stints at companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft in leadership roles. Most recently, she was leading Google’s first-party games studio, Stadia Games and Entertainment. Earlier this year, however, Google shut down its in-house developer. Although many other devs shifted to new roles, Raymond left the company entirely.
“It’s been a strange and difficult past 12 months,” Raymond wrote. “The pandemic, social injustice, and job elimination have impacted many of my closest friends, family, and co-workers. All of these factors, paired with an inability to see friends and family face-to-face, lulled me into a kind of self-reflective cocoon where I had to ask myself some tough questions about what really matters.”
