Sony Online Entertainment Becomes Daybreak Game Company

Yes a few years ago the parent company was shopping activision/blizzard around but instead blizzard took cash they had to buy themselves out.

in 2007 activision and blizzard merged with Vivendi Games and in 2013 they bought themselves out.

Oh well. TBH, I was wanting to take it as a hopeful sign.

Well, it is WoW you're talking about there. That game still has shine and makes a massive profit. Its also easily marketable and basically sells itself.

WoW is in a league on its own when it comes to MMORPGs, so that is not really a fair example.

What about Horizon?

Out of curiosity, what would it take to buy Daybreak ? 100 million, more ?

Probably half of the powerball last night if not less

It is fun to dream about.

True but its not fair to say this late in the game either how many are older

Yeah, plus it has the SOE logo etc on it still. That has been up for a while. Its old. I doubt DayBreak even knows that exists.

So Kids, this is how it really works.

CN acquires SOE from Sony.

$medley is given a contract to run the business.

$medley is given a piece of paper with financial targets and timeframes (very aggressive btw).

$medley brings in a couple of his top "go to guys" and they lay out the plan. The plan features layoffs almost by default as that is the ONLY place where he can get to the aggressive targets quickly.

The plan is submitted. If approved it is executed and heads start to roll.

That's the way it works. If you say $medley has options and can stand up to the Boss... re read above.

since the job postings refer to Daybreak and not SOE they cannot be very old, though it is kind of ironic what they have posted at the top of the page:

Where in that link is DayBreak mentioned? That page is still all "SOEed up" with old SOE logo and whatnot. Its very much old and its been up before this transition took place.

click on the jobs themselves, the text of the job descriptions refer to daybreak

#Numiko interesting a good spot lets see what happens with them I wonder how long they have been up there whether they are brand new or old adverts that were recently updated. Either way we can assume they are current since they were updated recently.

Only one team member for EQ though this is not so good.

If there are current job openings, that would not be uncommon. Often when you change your business plan you need to cut people that do not fit the new plan to open up salary for people that do.

^

Not hard to change a job description. Those same 19 have been up for awhile, before the acquisition.

What people don't realize is its common practice in most businesses. You fire the older employees and hire someone for half that salary to do the same job.

Maybe though this is purely expected. Sony hasn't been doing well, it doesn't have money to continue sinking into SOE hoping it will turn around. SOE is very likely not profitable, though EQ, EQ 2, and Planetside 2 might be at a point where they are slightly profitable they've lost so much money in failed IPs like Vanguard, SWG (failed in that they had to shut it down due to licensing and will never recoup money spent on it), and now quite an investment with little return on EQN and Landmark. They have probably been losing money as a unit for a long time now. Also SOE hasn't ever really integrated with the rest of Sony... PS2 has been porting to PS4 but that's still yet to come and the first major cross-division benefit of SOE for Sony.

Basically to me it looks like Sony is having rough times, SOE is in a net loss position as a division and Landmark monetization isn't coming together fast and EQN itself is still a ways out (I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of internal delays on the dev schedule too). So they wanted to offload SOE to get some capital and make their finance sheet look better.

This means a company buys it since it sees potential in what it does, what it can do, and what IP it holds.

Steps
1) Clear 10-20% of costs, payrol, extraneous expenses (like fan faire) etc
2) As part of #1 remove old leadership who *hasn't* been turning around the company for a long time... often this means everyone but the very top dog (ironically) s*** rolls down hill and what not
3) Bring in new talent, in some cases just as high paid or more, who you think can revive the company

Looks like they're at step #3, and it may be rinse and repeated if things don't get better 6 months, 1 year, etc from now.

#slasher very true but not if you plan on selling and gutting the business you just acquired I mean this still is not very good for us or for EQ2 as they are only hiring one team member a game more than they fired but for the company as a whole it is good.

You notice most of the positions are programmers.