Jade Raymond, the former Ubisoft Toronto managing director and executive producer, has said that it is the constantly evolving nature of video games that enticed her into the industry in the first place.
"I got into the game industry because it is this undefined thing that has been evolving continuously and constantly changing," Raymond told Polygon.
She added: "It's funny because every year you go to these events like DICE or wherever, and everybody's talking about, 'Oh my god, disruption in the game industry and it's crazy.' But it's like, 'Haven't you been in the game industry forever, and hasn't there been this crazy disruption every single year?' Either it's social games on Facebook, oh no, now it's mobile, oh no, now it's Early Access, now it's VR and HoloLens.
"That's what the industry is. That's what attracted me to it. I love the fact that we are pushing the medium forward, and what the medium is, is continuously redefining the way people engage. I think games will continue to evolve and I want to be part of that process of pushing things forward."
For Raymond there's the realisation that things have actually gone full circle, at least from her standpoint.
"The reality is, there is no more boxed product where I ship a game and now I'm done and I go on vacation, right?" she says. "That's just not the model anymore. It's just not the way things are.
"It's funny because I spent the first half of my career doing online games, and it's just really tiring because you always push to get the game out, but then that's when it really starts. That's when the shit hits the fan. You have the real customers, you have to watch it, constant updates, then finally you're finding out what they like, what they don't like, you have to iterate, iterate. After doing that for the first eight, nine years of my career, I was like, 'Oh my god, I just want to go work at Ubisoft and ship a game.'
"That doesn't exist anymore."
What's next for Raymond is still up in the air, or at least she's not ready to announce anything yet.
"I like the part of thinking what the big new franchise could be," Raymond says. "I'd like to continue to have a chance to do that. I also am pretty excited about all the new tech and platforms coming out. I think games, in some of the new spaces, whether it's purely online with free-to-play or VR or stuff like that, have other opportunities to innovate, which you might do on a smaller scale. It's a different kind of experience where you could also deliver something.
"I guess there's a lot of stuff I'm pretty interested in."
