Jade Raymond's Haven Studio is already inspiring other PlayStation studios - and not just with its game
Christopher Dring
Head of Games B2B
Monday 11th July 2022
The ink has now dried. The team at Haven Studios -- the Canadian game developer led by industry veteran Jade Raymond -- are now officially PlayStation employees.
The two companies announced the planned acquisition in March. And when we spoke back then, it was clear why Sony was interested in buying a team that had only been founded in 2021.
For starters, it's a company filled with established talent, not just Raymond but a whole number of experienced names who were behind major hits such as Assassin's Creed and Rainbow Six: Siege. The developer is also making a live service title, which fits neatly with Sony's stated ambition to push further into online service-based games. And it also sees PlayStation gain a presence in Canada, one of the world's most successful games development countries.
Today, as the deal is finally confirmed, we've caught up with Haven again. And a lot has changed in just a short amount of time. The developer now has 106 employees -- a rise over more than 50 since October last year -- so it's certainly no small indie team anymore.
Jade Raymond, Haven Studios
And what's more it's made some key engineering hires, and significantly increased its investment in R&D and the cloud.
"We already mentioned that we built the studio in a cloud and that was our vision since we started during the pandemic," Raymond tells us. "We didn't have offices at first and we thought why not innovate here and avoid people having these big machines and VPNing in?
"We had a cloud team initially that was about six people working on new ways to work. Now, we've just welcomed another 21 engineers to focus on long-term cloud innovation, because we really believe it's going to be a
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