Any Credibility Daybreak Games Had is Gone Now, No Matter Who Actually Owns Them (Updated)
One month ago, the only concerns on the minds of the executives at Daybreak Games centered on their self-described “originator of stand alone battle royale” title, H1Z1. The game had been dealing with diminishing player counts as the battle royale market was usurped by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite, prompting the studio to transition the game to free-to-play model. Developers were also concurrently preparing the game for the launch of an open beta on PlayStation 4, which is still scheduled to launch this month. None of these are out of the ordinary for your standard developer, but Daybreak would soon become the originator of something far more peculiar.
On April 24, the same day Daybreak announced H1Z1 was coming to PlayStation 4, news broke of sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on a number of Russian businesses and oligarchs, freezing their assets in response to what officials categorized as “destabilizing activities.” One of the affected oligarchs was Renova Group owner Viktor Vekselberg. Columbus Nova, a New York investment firm whose biggest client is Renova, reportedly purchased Daybreak in 2015 when it was known as Sony Online Entertainment. As both the developer’s employees and player base worried over the future of the studio, Daybreak dropped a bombshell.
Two days later, Daybreak released a statement claiming that it was never owned by Columbus Nova, but was actually purchased and has always been owned by then member of Columbus Nova’s board of directors Jason Epstein. The studio further ret-conned its ownership by deleting the press release announcing the studio’s purchase by Columbus Nova in 2015. There’s still plenty of existing and archived evidence that show Columbus Nova as the purchaser, including naming the investment firm as Daybreak’s parent company in its 2015 User Privacy Policy, but Daybreak has remained steadfast in its denial since April 26.
The fallout from the news has grown to encompass the planned layoff of roughly 70 employees, the exit of Senior Vice President Laura Naviaux Sturr, Columbus Nova scrubbing connections to Renova Group from its website, and the discovery of payments totaling $500,000 made from Columbus Nova to Trump attorney and apparent slush fund manager Michael Cohen in exchange for access to the president. What began as a middle-school level attempt to spin some overwhelmingly bad press at the sake of the studio’s credibility has ballooned into a scandal that links the creators of Everquest to a scummy target of the Mueller investigation.
