Jade Raymond’s journey to EA, Star Wars games, and a new Montreal studio

Raymond: It is. It’s a lot of pressure.

Soderlund: It’s a big responsibility for us as a company. But it’s more toward — it’s a bit scary, because Star Wars is so well-known and so loved by so many. You want to make sure that you don’t screw it up. You have to make sure that whatever you do is what people are looking for. Staying true to the brand and respecting the brand, the idea of what Star Wars is for many people, is the one thing we have to pay attention to in the long term.

We have a good dialogue with Disney and Lucas. The closer we get to the launch of Battlefront, the more nervous I’ll be, obviously. But for now it feels good.

GamesBeat: You’re getting used to the idea of having a billion hardcore fans here?

Raymond: It’s pretty cool. It’s obviously a big draw for people in the industry. It’s a dream project. In terms of being able to build a studio and work on Star Wars as our first project, it’s a pretty great way to get a passionate team rattling around the same idea.

GamesBeat: What about the idea of EA and women in leadership?

Raymond: It seems like there’s a pretty good balance. Laura Miele I’ve met a couple of times. She’s amazing. She has a big role in the publishing division. Samantha Ryan is here now. I’ve met her at different times. It’s great to finally be working together, because I’ve heard great things about her from other people in the industry who’ve worked with her. Lucy Bradshaw I remember from when I worked here before, when she was running Maxis. We’ve already worked together. It’s a pretty good bench of women in senior positions — doing production roles and other different roles across the organization.

Above: Amy Hennig

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

GamesBeat: If you could excerpt the last year’s worth of stuff going on, do you feel like the situation is improving for women in leadership roles in the industry?

Raymond: At Ubisoft Toronto, half of the senior management team reporting to me were women. I don’t think it’s so difficult to find qualified women. It’s getting better. As games become more and more mass-market — I was just chatting with Peter and he was telling me how the latest figures for GTA were 54 million copies sold or something. It’s not geeks in their basements playing games. To get to those numbers, it’s a big portion of the population playing games.

I thought about a career making games because I played games when I was a kid. The more it becomes a mass-market medium, the more women will think of it as a career, and the more our industry will reflect the numbers that exist out in society at large.

Soderlund: In general, I’ve seen a change in the last few years. Not only women in senior leadership, but if you look at our studios, we have more and more women in general. Gaming as an entertainment form is speaking to a bigger market. If you look at mobile gaming, I’d assume that 50 percent of the players there — at least — are women. I have two daughters who play a ton on their phones.

We’re seeing a lot more women engineers, as well as artists and employees in general, in our development studios. It’s a slow process, but there’s absolutely a change compared to five, six, 10 years ago.

GamesBeat: Does it feel unusual, still, to be making the hardest of the hardcore games as a woman?

Raymond: Any time a woman is doing something that doesn’t make you think, “Oh, that’s a woman’s movie” or “Oh, that’s a woman’s game,” I guess that gets a little bit more attention. But what can I say? That’s what I like. I like the most cheesy, ridiculous action movies. I like survival horror games. My favorite games when I was a kid were fighting games, because I liked winning against whoever I was playing against. It was fun to challenge my friends.

I guess that’s why, on a personal level, it does bother me when we talk about “women’s games” as a category — like, “Let’s make a game for girls.” A good game is a good game. Is Mario a game for girls? If you look at Nintendo’s games, they’re great games and they’re played by boys and girls. Anyway, it’s still surprising because we do have certain ideas about what games girls play. But that’s becoming less and less the case, that it has to have pink ponies in it or something.

GamesBeat: I went to the women’s panel at GDC, the “Reason to Be” one. There was a lot of talk about hardships on the panel. Amy Hennig had some interesting comments, though, basically saying, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” She’s wanted to encourage more women to consider games as a career, because she’s been doing it for so long and so successfully.

Raymond: We talk about that too, because we’re friends. Being a woman in the game industry, you do get the question a lot — “What’s it like?” Our experiences are similar. The one thing is, maybe we would be less likely to — she doesn’t necessarily take the spotlight so often, or as much as she could. Maybe she does that because of the feedback she gets from women, that it’s nice to have an example of a woman creative director out there. We agree that’s a great, positive way to go about it, to just be more visible and show women that this is a great industry to work in. You can be successful. There are other women doing it.

GamesBeat: Is Amy a good example of the people you want to gather into your studio? Her type of veteran who’s been around for many years?

Raymond: Amy’s amazing. It’s not just her craft, how well she’s mastered making these kinds of emotionally rich narrative experiences. She’s also a great person to have on a team. She rolls up her sleeves. She’s very humble. So yes, as far as values, she’s great.

As far as the types of people we’re hiring, it’s great to have a mix of young people and veterans. Then you get the right balance. It ties in to your question about women in the industry. What’s important isn’t just women. It’s diversity in your game teams in general. If you have a team of people who are all 35-year-old guys wearing the same T-shirt, you’ll make a game that appeals to only them. To sell 54 million copies, you have to make a game that appeals to a broad range of people. You have young people, old people, people from different parts of the world, people who play different types of games. That’s how you make great entertainment.

Above: Battlefield Hardline has scenes in Florida’s Everglades.

Image Credit: EA

GamesBeat: Are you happy with the level of creativity you see around the industry? Do you feel like everyone’s reaching the bar that they could?

Raymond: There’s always something interesting to me as far as new innovations going into games and where people setting the bar. You have to do that, because that’s what gamers expect. When you make a game that’s sort of a clone of the last game, it doesn’t find the success you’d want. Our audience cares about innovation. People making games realize that.

Obviously making games is hard, so it doesn’t always end up the way you want it to. But I’m still excited to play all the new games coming out.

GamesBeat: Patrick, how would you look at making sure that EA doesn’t take any wrong turns and potentially lose that creativity?

Soderlund: For me it’s about fully understanding that we’re an entertainment company. We’re not a financial institution or a platform company. Our job in the world is to entertain. Right now, EA is a place where the creator in general has a lot of respect and a lot of gravitas. That comes not only from Andrew, but from the publishing teams and everything else.

I’ve been here a long time, and I’ve never seen the different parts of EA collaborate so well. The publishing teams and development teams, how involved our marketing and publishing teams are in the early stages of development — it’s not up to one person to decide that we’re going to be creative. It’s in the culture of the company.

EA has always been a creative place, I think. Otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed here. I’ve been able to do so many great things here with so many other people. Maybe it’s how we present ourselves, how we position ourselves as a company. You can’t just say, “Today we’re a different company.” It starts from the top. It’s building a different culture and it takes time.

That’s what we’ve tried to do, to put forth the fact that we’re an entertainment company, that we’re never better than our last game, that we have to push boundaries and keep doing new things. In the cases where we’ve built sequels or yearly iterations, that’s all fine, but let’s make sure we challenge ourselves and our teams to push what it means to build those types of games.

GTAV sold 54 million units. It’s one of the best games this industry has ever created, and it’s a sequel. We have to have a similar approach to what we do. Whether we’re building FIFA or Battlefield or Star Wars or something new, we have to come to it with the approach of — in order to get people to buy what we build and continue to play our games, we’d better be innovative. We’d better push boundaries. We’d better make the game they want. And once they’ve bought we’d better make sure they want to keep playing it.

Andrew and the executive team have put the notion of “player first” as a key mantra for us at the company. People may look at that and say, “That’s just a buzzword.” It’s not. It’s a true way of thinking. I’ve been in so many meetings where Peter Moore or someone will say, “That’s not a player-first initiative. We can’t do it that way.” If you view everything through that lens and say, “We have to do what’s right for our players,” and understand that’s the right thing to do — sometimes it’s not the easy thing in the short term, like delaying Hardline or giving the Dragon Age team more time. Even something like investing a ton of money in building a new studio up in Montreal. We have enough studios, one could argue, but I don’t think we have the right talent yet to build another GTA, another game that can do 54 million units in the action space. We want external talent for that.

It’s not as simple as just what I want. The whole company needs to have that viewpoint. Will we always have that? Who knows? But right now we do. I see people aligning around that.