f13.net

Dear Players, Partners and Friends,

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have been acquired by Columbus Nova, an investment management firm well known for its success with its existing portfolio of technology, media and entertainment focused companies. This means that effective immediately SOE will operate as an independent game development studio where we will continue to focus on creating exceptional online games for players around the world, and now as a multi-platform gaming company. Yes, that means PlayStation and Xbox, mobile and more!

As part of this transition, SOE will now become Daybreak Game Company. This name embodies who we are as an organization, and is a nod to the passion and dedication of our employees and players. It is also representative of our vision to approach each new day as an opportunity to move gaming forward.

So what exactly does this mean for you? It will be business as usual and all SOE games will continue on their current path of development and operation. In fact, we expect to have even more resources available to us as a result of this acquisition. It also means new exciting developments for our existing IP and games as we can now fully embrace the multi-platform world we are living in.

Our games and players are the heart and soul of our organization, and we are committed to maintaining our portfolio of online games and pushing the limits of where we can take online gaming together.

Thank you for your continued support. See you in game!

The Team at Daybreak

That is indeed a head scratcher. Sony dumping SOE is understandable considering SOE hasn't been relevant since 2004 and Sony is still in deep doo-doo but apparently no gaming or entertainment company was interested.

CN takes a value-oriented, long-term view to investing and seeks consistent returns with an emphasis on capital preservation.

Value-oriented long-term means the exact opposite of "buy a loser on the cheap, gangrape it, chop it up with a cleaver, and sell the pieces for sausage meat". But I guess websites can lie.

As for fans of current SOE titles, Sam, I can't think of anything beyond PS2 or the Zombie game that's floundering. EQ1 & EQ2 were relevant once and still have customers, but that's not saying much.

Didn't we have a bunch of people here buy into Landmark?

Didn't we have a bunch of people here buy into Landmark?

Wait, wasn't all the PSN stuff for the PS3 and PS4 being run out of SOE?

PlanetSide 2 is still chugging along, I'm guessing we make them some money from the item sales and the subscriptions (not sure but they had said PS2 was making them some money), and they set a world record the other night on the 24th http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/01/26/planetside-2-sets-world-record-for-most-online-players-in-single-fps-battle

Not sure what the hell is going to happen. It was getting better with time, sure they make stupid mistakes, but they still keep trying and tweaking.

SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) runs PSN.

Because you don't have a PC or because you like inferior versions of good games?

My ejuice company has had a flavor named Daybreak for over a year. I wonder if this will negatively impact our sales.

Shocking.

Well I don't think anyone expected it to be bloodless but the scale I'm hearing sounds like shit is being burnt to the ground.

I guess this really is goodbye EQ. Landmark or Next, both of them.

With georgeson, danuser and butler gone it feels like eq next in its current form is dead.

At this point, and with so many blunders under their belt and so little successes, it's crazy that Smedley keeps falling on his feet.

Jeff Butler does still seem to be with Daybreak, and I have not seen reports of anything to the contrary.

At this point, and with so many blunders under their belt and so little successes, it's crazy that Smedley keeps falling on his feet.

This is basically exactly what I expected after learning of the sale, so not surprises.  Kind of a shame I guess, but more from the standpoint that the makers of EQ, one of the defining games of the genre, are essentially being broken down for scrap (such that they can really be called the makers of EQ by now anyway, but I digress).  It's more a statement about the condition of the industry than anything.

I came on to say goodbye to you guys (at least in my current role, prepare for lurking), but after scanning the front page I wanted to change the flavor of the post a bit.

Columbus Nova deserves no hate in all this. They are more like white knights than negative forces here. SOE needed a shake up/new direction, and CN provided that. They have done nothing but been gracious in their new ownership, and they went out of their way to make sure that Devs and support teams that got laid off were taken care of. Right now things seem shitty, and of course for the folks that were let go, today was rough, but CN and DB were both very open about the need for restructuring. This wasn't a surprise to folks in the company.

What's P99? Google says it's a pistol.

I know some old EQ1 friends playing this and loving it. Grind is there in all its old glory but nostalgia seems to be shielding that. Also, no asshats.

Other than the asshat that runs the whole thing?

When everyone is an asshat, no one is an asshat. 

Who asses the asshats?

Got to hand it to those P99 guys, they take that oldschool EQ thing seriously. Appointing a smarmy dickmunch as the public face of the game shows their extreme commitment to verisimilitude at all costs. Extra points if he's a cokehead. Next step, bring in an overtly hostile introvert as the community manager. Then P99 will be essentially indistinguishable from playing EQ back in 1999.

See y'all in najena! Who's got drelzna camp? /wrists

I too remember the nostalgia, and then I remember the anxiety of a 3 hour Plane of Fear corpse run at 4 in the morning.

Imagine joining WoW now.

That would really suck.

I don't know if I was clear or not but I meant as a developer. You're coming onto something 10 years old that's basically just treading water now, seems like it would be tremendously boring.

WoW still has over 7 million players. It's not in maintenance mode. If your argument is that the developers are forced to stick to very tight constraints, offering up teats filled with the same sickly-sweet dikuclone pap to pacify their gargantuan milling herds of liquid-eyed cattle players-- from the changes in recent expansion packs, that really isn't true. Sure, they haven't turned WoW into a completely different genre, it's not a first-person shooter now, but they committed to massive new features not directly aligned to diku gameplay, like pokemon in the previous expansion and facebook-style garrison missions in this one. They are willing to make and solidly commit to wildly unpopular changes too, like removing flying mounts.

Now you might argue that all that stuff makes baby Jesus cry. And I would agree, I hate all that crap. Losing flying turned me off WoW permanently. But the devs aren't constrained in the manner you describe. They have some degree of freedom.

WoW turned off flying mounts? Didn't some folks pay real money for some of those?

I'd be pretty pissed too.

Yeah, the argument was it both trivialized content and limited the options for endgame player interaction with the world because they'd do the "run, drop in, run off" thing unless all activities happened in a cave. .

It triggered me.

I always felt jumping off the side of a cliff and shiting into bird form in the air was just awesome, was one of my favorite parts of the game.

Yeah, there was a time when a comment like this would be enough to nudge me into a resub.  I mean, granted, that was when Wrath of the Lich King was out, but still...

You know, it's kind of funny, I'll always consider all the stuff after my first quit "new."  I quit for the first time near the end of burning crusade, came back for wrath, quit, came back for a little bit cataclysm, and then that was it.  Still, anything post-Burning Crusade still somehow gets sorted in my mind as "the new stuff."  :oh_i_see:

I've always been of the opinion that the best way to make content worth doing is actually making it fun.  If players are trying to skip your content, maybe your content sucks.

Back on EQ1 a lot of my nostalgia and social connections came from fighting the game and the company that made it, not really having fun in it, especially when looked at through the lens of all of the MMOs and other games (and platforms) that have come since. I can understand the nostalgia play on P99 and all that. But man, I'd need to unwind almot 1/3 of my life to go back to the kind of gamer that got attracted to EQ1 in the first place.

Yeah, the leveling stuff is still great, it falls apart at the endgame. But really that applies to every MMO.

Smed's obviously trying to be Trump's VP pick.

Because a CEO is going off on Twitter about how a 17 year-old is going to "get his" after his judicial system handed down a sentence he didn't approve of?

a) It makes him sound like a whiny baby.

b) He's the CEO of a company--it reflects horribly upon the company.

c) Despite his best efforts to run the company into the ground (or is it a second since I guess he succeeded the first time?), he's still got more power than some teenager in Finland ever will.  Mostly he's just going to win sympathy for the kid while making himself look like a jerk that deserved what he got.  Besides being counter-productive, it's unseemly.

I like Smedley.

He's being a retard.

Also, there are rules about "well-off" people being victims.

Maybe if someone where to make available info about you and your family's personal details online, send you and your family harassing messages and threats, send in a fake bomb threat to the plane your flying in and cost the company you run thousands and thousands of dollars, you might not be so conciliatory either.   Like I said, it wasn't a good idea for him to respond the way he did, but I can understand it.  This 17 year old "kid" is a piece of shit who got off very lightly with a sentence that in no way can be considered a deterrent to him or others.  As much as we all dislike him, Smedley, and more importantly, his family, are the victims here, not the "kid".  I thought blaming victims wasn't cool?  Or is it ok when it's someone you don't care about?

Also, there are rules about "well-off" people being victims.

I like him personally and you seriously needs better villains.

There are FAR better villains than Smedley.

Like, for example, Zoe Quinn. Nerd.

And yes, he has reacted in exactly the wrong way by...reacting.

I don't hate the guy.  I just think he's been bad for gaming and I'm shocked (well, not really) that he's managed to keep his job after grinding soe into the dirt through mismanagement.  He's just another name in a lost list of people who have been in the industry way too long, contributing way too little and living off of their past success, with that success usually being of the one hit wonder variety. 

No, sorry, not going to let this slide by. Smed has personally come through for me at times when I desperately needed it, and there was no reason to do it except that he's genuinely a nice guy. As for "grinding SOE into the dirt": SOE, even if renamed (I remember when it was Sony Interactive Studios America, then briefly Redeye Interactive, then Verant, then finally SOE, all with Smed in charge) has survived.  Name one other company that has been around through the last 15 years of this industry (I'll give you a hint, there's exactly one). While everybody else in this industry has been trying to figure out how to monetize being an asshole, Smed has quietly and mostly without drama kept the lights on at his shop.

Not without some pain, hell, he's fired *me* twice. But the drama and fireworks has all been generated by other people, and he's been the one that shoveled out all the bullshit afterwards.

--Dave (Technically, Brad McQuaid fired me the first time, the second time was a layoff that caught me, Brad, and a couple of hundred other people)

No, sorry, not going to let this slide by. Smed has personally come through for me at times when I desperately needed it, and there was no reason to do it except that he's genuinely a nice guy. As for "grinding SOE into the dirt": SOE, even if renamed (I remember when it was Sony Interactive Studios America, then briefly Redeye Interactive, then Verant, then finally SOE, all with Smed in charge) has survived.  Name one other company that has been around through the last 15 years of this industry (I'll give you a hint, there's exactly one). While everybody else in this industry has been trying to figure out how to monetize being an asshole, Smed has quietly and mostly without drama kept the lights on at his shop.

Not without some pain, hell, he's fired *me* twice. But the drama and fireworks has all been generated by other people, and he's been the one that shoveled out all the bullshit afterwards.

--Dave (Technically, Brad McQuaid fired me the first time, the second time was a layoff that caught me, Brad, and a couple of hundred other people)

I'll bite... Turbine?

I've met Smed a few times. He came to Germany a few times to talk to us when we were developing Bullet Run and we hung out with him in LA for E£ back in 2012. He is actually a nice guy who really, really likes games. Apparently a lot of his working day is just him in his office playing Eve or EQII or whatever his timesink du jour happens to be. At E3 he made sure that everyone was ok, he was laserlike in his focus to make sure nothing was preventing us from putting on a good show - all the way down to taking the whole crew out to a Korean Karaoke bar and opening a tab.

Turbine isn't in the online game business anymore, they have been rebuilt as an in-house shop for Warner Bros.

--Dave

Yeah, saying "trolls just happen" is basically abdicating our common social responsibility, IMHO.

So what's your plan to "fix" them?

Sounds a lot like the owner of the company I just left.  On a personal level he's a good guy whom I wouldn't mind hanging out with.

The second money or business is involved he devolves into a moron I want nothing to do with.

What gives the trolls their power is how easy people are to manipulate and provoke. It's really that simple, without the reactions, they're just spewing bullshit into the void, but they create positive feedback loops of reactions and counter-reaction. Often, not even with any real goal besides seeing just how big a shitstorm they can create.

--Dave

Ah, cmon, you know as well as I that the stuff they've done to Smed is a bit beyond just "spewing bullshit into the void."

More social media sites should look at that Riot is doing with League of Legends...

Remember, this didn't start with shitposting. It started with DDOSing multiple companies, and calling a bomb threat into a plane. I don't think that happened because of Smed complaining about them on Twitter.

In general I agree he didn't handle it great. But I don't see how something that started with DDOSing multiple companies gets handwaved away as "it started with shitposting." It started with DDOSing multiple companies. :P

Best to plug what cracks you can and otherwise ignore it so it can search for juicier targets.

I agree with that too. Publicizing the bad behavior just leads to more of it, people feel rewarded by the attention, etc. The answer is going to be somewhere in between.

The problem is that the legal system for this sort of stuff is pretty slow/ineffective.

Like, if you're an American and a Croatian hacker decides to fuck with you and SWAT you or send a bomb threat or whatever- what's your recourse? What if it's a country that could give 1/5th of a shit?

Looks like Smedley's getting the boot (http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/22/daybreak-game-companys-john-smedley-steps-down-as-chief-executive-officer/), though the exact nature of the boot is yet to be announced. Or maybe he just got sick of being in charge, but the wording sure makes it sound involuntary.

My good friend [...]

got me to play with him [...]

casually.

I truly feel bad for Smedley. He didn't realize he was entering the bad part of town, and bringign his family along with it.

I understand why some can be concerned with the idea of victim-blaming. I get that. But it's so easy to get set up as a target nowadays, it's kind of hard to know when you've become one.

Patently disagree. Everyone here knows I like Smedley, so I'll keep this short and blunt (as always ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

If you're gonna be a CEO or executive at any company - not even just gaming - and you want to say shit on something like Twitter, fucking don't, because that urge you just had is why you're stupid and will fail.

Talking is fucking bush league.

My point is that the tools of the internet allow the "bad guys" to have an easy* run of the place. The only real defense currently is obscurity. Unless the moderators show up or all this shit gets trammeled.

Patently disagree. Everyone here knows I like Smedley, so I'll keep this short and blunt (as always ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

If you're gonna be a CEO or executive at any company - not even just gaming - and you want to say shit on something like Twitter, fucking don't, because that urge you just had is why you're stupid and will fail.

Talking is fucking bush league.

To be fair, we also need to mention that SOE's image had a dramatic positive turnaround with the community management done by Linda Carlson and by Smed engaging directly with the playerbase. Night and day to the old image. That's the tradeoff right there.

Yes.  Why did this take 16 years to implement?

Yes.  Why did this take 16 years to implement?

Because they keep paying a sub?

Because they keep paying a sub?

Smed has departed Daybreak to start a new company.