The reason why a few people got the boot isn’t fully because of their game performs badly – there’s way more behind to it.

Earlier this week, the United States government has frozen assets for several Russian oligarchs due to causing „destabilization” – think of the 2016 elections. How is this action related to Daybreak Games, the developers of H1Z1?

One of the businessmen that got into the crosshair is Viktor Vekselberg. He owns Renova Group, which is the subsidiary of Columbus Nova. About the latter, there were ramblings about them owning Daybreak after they purchased them from Sony in early 2015. Until now, the story was somewhat easy to follow, but things take a sharp turn at this point. MassivelyOP writes about Daybreak publishing a statement, which denies any relationship to Columbus Nova.

„Jason Epstein, a former member of Columbus Nova, is and has always been the primary owner and executive chairman of Daybreak Game Company (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) which he acquired from Sony in February 2015,” Daybreak wrote. Let’s stop here for a moment. Jason Smedley, the previous president, according to VG247, named Columbus Nova as the investment firm which acquired Daybreak/SOE in 2015.

„It was current executive chairman Jason Epstein, former senior managing partner of Columbus Nova that acquired Daybreak, not Columbus Nova itself. That distinction was never corrected in the past, so we are correcting that now,” Daybreak wrote. On Twitter, DKTanic found the privacy policy of Daybreak, and in it, Columbus Nova is named as Daybreak’s parent company.

Interesting timing: two days later, Daybreak announced layoffs, and nearly seventy employees were fired. Three people have been confirmed to be laid off: Ry Schueller (brand manager), Steve Melton (operational engineering manager), and J. Goldberg (community manager). Daybreak responded with another statement:

„Daybreak confirms we are realigning our workforce to better position our company for the future. Because of this, we have had to make an extremely difficult decision to part ways with some of our employees across various disciplines at the studio. We are doing everything we can to take care of each affected individual by providing them appropriate transition assistance. Daybreak remains focused on publishing and developing large-scale online games and will continue to service our existing and long-standing games and franchises.”

The suspicious thing here is that H1Z1‘s PlayStation 4 port was announced just a few days ago, and it might have been a desperate move, which might not be enough to salvage Daybreak. Gazillion Games were shut down despite releasing a new version of Marvel Heroes.

Despite going free-to-play, H1Z1 is far from its glory days on PC (7000 concurrent players versus 200 thousand during its heydays), which means Daybreak’s future looks bleak…

Source: VG247