Leaderboard: Do you buy the ‘Grand Daybreak Unification’ theory?

Yesterday, MMO blogger Wilhelm Arcturus of The Ancient Gaming Noob dropped a fun conspiracy theory in the comments of our piece on EVE Online covering how CCP is rather inexplicably moving EVE Vegas to San Diego in 2020. “This is actually the first sign that Pearl Abyss is planning to buy some or all of Daybreak,” he prophesied, “and the San Diego event will become PearlCon 2020.” I think he started out half-kidding, but ever since he posted it I’ve been a dog with a bone about this thing because damn, this is plausible, guys. Consider the scenario:

Pearl Abyss, which is worth a truckton of money thanks to Black Desert and its other ventures, bought CCP Games and EVE Online last September and then promptly set up a SoCal base of ops here in the US. This week, CCP Games just announced that EVE Vegas will not return in 2020; instead, the event will move to San Diego, which is an odd out-of-the-blue choice given that it’s neither central, convenient, or cheap. Daybreak, of course, is headquartered in San Diego, while Pearl Abyss’ new American branch is about an hour or so north.

Daybreak, you’ll surely recall, has struggled mightily under its bizarrely obfuscated current ownership after being sold off from SOE in 2015. Just in the last year, it’s suffered multiple rounds of layoffs, project and closures and cancellations, a huge esports financial scandal, and investment moves that looked pretty desperate. But recently, it’s been pouring love into EverQuest, EverQuest II, PlanetSide 2, and DC Universe Online; it’s started polling for a new fan event (with possible locations in San Diego or Vegas); it’s been talking up the future of EverQuest; and it pulled PlanetSide Arena out of a half year’s hibernation. Above all else, we’ve been watching all summer as Daybreak has been registering websites and trademarks for Darkpaw Games, Rogue Planet Games, and Golden Age Studios, plus it registered a new Daybreak Game Studios LLC to boot (it filed for Bronze Age Studios last year).

These are not the moves of a doomed company being stripped for parts, but what’s got it so confident? Is it about to be “rescued” from a holding company and antsy investors as CCP was? As Brasse put it… “Fascinating.”

Anyhow, I need to stress that what Wilhelm jokingly referred to as the “Grand Daybreak Unification” theory is pure speculation – as I mentioned to another writer, if I had found any hard evidence, this’d be a news post with a breaking tag on it and not a poll. But a poll it is. Do you buy the theory at all? If not, what are they up to?

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