PlayStation Officially Acquires Jade Raymond's Haven Studios
The Assassin's Creed veteran joins the PlayStation family! Here's everything known about Haven and what they got in the works.
As announced by PlayStation in a recent Tweet, the agreement to acquire Haven Studios has now been finalized, officially making them a first-party team under the brand’s umbrella. Haven Studios is a new team, yet to release a game, but is led by Jade Raymond, who is best known for working as a producer on the early Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs games. She later moved from Ubisoft to Google Stadia, but after those internal teams went belly-up, she decided to create her own studio in Montreal, Quebec, Haven, which was quickly courted by PlayStation.
The announcement of the acquisition occurred back in March 2022, by the Head of PlayStation studios, Hermen Hulst, but even before that, the entities had announced that they were working together, if only in a second-party capacity. Despite Raymond’s respectable resume, many questioned the move of acquiring a studio before they’d even made a game, and wondered what was it about Haven that made PlayStation want to jump in so quickly. Reasonable speculations were the large acquisitions by their competitors, Xbox, and/or PlayStation wanted to establish themselves within the vibrant developer market in Montreal.
However, Raymond’s most recent interview with gamesindustry.biz provides more tangible information. Given as Haven’s genesis was right in the heart of the pandemic, remote work was a necessity. This is far from a rare occurrence these days, but what does seem to be quite unique is their approach to building their studio “in a cloud.” Raymond states that what was initially a team of six working on this cloud concept, has expanded to 21, and is focusing on “long-term cloud innovation,” beyond just the game they are working on currently.
Cloud gaming, or game streaming, like what’s offered by Stadia, is always brought up as a promising system, where you can play games without downloading anything or having expensive hardware, but it’s seldom talked about in terms of what it can do for game developers. Raymond explains that just like streaming games, having a studio in the cloud means you can work on a game’s build without needing to have the data on your machine, so everything is accessed faster, and adjustments by different members are assimilated more easily. Raymond also specifies the payoff of not needing an IT team to help developers set up machines in their homes.
This has caught the attention of other teams in the PlayStation family, with Haven’s CTO speaking to various Sony studio heads about the technicalities of their cloud processes. It’s also perked up Mark Cerny’s ears, the lead architect behind the PlayStation consoles. Raymond states that Cerny is “one of the main reasons we’re investing so much in R&D, and in this very senior engineering team.”
In a prior interview, Raymond spoke more about the game they’re making, revealing that it’s a live service game that focuses on “games as a social platform.” She spoke about creating games as a place where the younger generation can co-exist with friends. She also spoke about user-generated content, marking the importance of creating something where users can express their creativity and iterate on what is already there.
Jose Garcia
Jose is an experienced video game analyst and reviewer, who earned his chops producing long-form video essays about the industry, those getting him his first bit of online recognition. His thousands of hours into Smash and Pokemon earn him the well-deserved title of “Nintendo Nerd” (he likes to say expert), but at heart, he, like many of us, is someone who appreciates the art of games in all its forms.
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