Jade Raymond

Jade Raymond is President and Founder of Haven Studios, which was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2022 establishing Haven as the first PlayStation Studio in Canada. Jade is best known for helping create the Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs franchises, founding the Ubisoft Toronto and EA Motive studios, and was Vice President at Google.

Passionate about arts and sciences since childhood, Jade joined the games industry as an engineer and has focused her career on driving innovation in action-adventure and online multiplayer games while supporting the advancement of women and youth in game development and technology through her volunteer work on the boards of AIAS, C2 Montreal, and WIFT. In March 2024, Jade established the McGill University Jade Raymond Bursary for Women in Computer Science in 2024.

Jade is a recognized pioneer of the video game industry, receiving the New York Video Game Critics Circle Legend Award, as well as the Pioneer Award at the Guggenheim Museum Games Festival. Jade was named to the Variety Magazine list of the top 500 most influential business leaders shaping entertainment in 2018 and 2019 and was #1 on the list of Canadian Gaming Tycoons on the Macleans Power List 2023.  

How Culture Can Make or Break Growth & Success      

Culture has the power to connect and motivate development teams. It can also influence the success of your game, and in extreme cases, cause the downfall of studios. When a studio is small, it’s more straightforward to rally around a shared set of values and expectations. But what happens when you shift to grow your studio, adding dozens and potentially hundreds of people from different backgrounds, with diverse experiences, that may even be based in geographically-distant locations? In the roundtable, we will discuss the importance of being adaptable as your team grows, best practices around setting up a strong culture with different team sizes and locations, and unexpected ways culture can influence a game and studio’s success.