EA Motive boss: "Cancellations in video game development shouldn't be a taboo thing"

“At the beginning it was a little bit complicated, I’m not gonna lie,” Patrick Klaus, general manager of Motive Studio tells me. We’re talking via Zoom following another public briefing from his team on its upcoming Dead Space remake, Motive’s eagerly-anticipated revival of the space-set survival horror series which is due out on 27th January. But the purpose of our chat is far broader than Dead Space – taking in Motive’s past and looking to its future, where a massive new Iron Man – the studio’s most ambitious project yet by far – now sits on the horizon.

Until recently, Motive feels like it has flown under the radar. Founded in 2015 as EA’s new Montreal home for former Assassin’s Creed co-creator Jade Raymond, it took five years for the studio to ship its first game: the generally well-regarded Star Wars Squadrons. By this point, Raymond had already been gone two years – poached by Google to work on the ill-fated Stadia. Meanwhile, an ambitious new IP the studio had been trying to build – shown publicly in 2020 by EA via a brief snippet of concept footage – was still struggling to find direction.

“My predecessor had left and it was still a young studio that hadn’t shipped,” Klaus says of Motive, when he joined to replace Raymond in 2019. “Motive had contributed to Battlefront 2’s campaign but was a really young studio, and I would say the first couple of years really have been [about us] searching for our identity and our purpose, like some of those other more established studios.” Motive isn’t yet a household name in the way other EA teams like BioWare or Criterion might be, Klaus agrees – but that, he hopes, will change.