Last week, we covered the puzzling news that EG7’s CEO Robin Flodin has been (at least temporarily?) replaced by Daybreak’s Ji Ham, a move that concerned gamers who’d seen Flodin’s candor since EG7 bought Daybreak last year as a huge boon for Daybreak and its MMOs.
Ji Ham, of course, first surfaced in our reporting back in 2016, when the then-Columbus Nova executive and apparent co-president of Daybreak took over in the wake of the departures of Russell Shanks and John Smedley’s abrupt departure. We hopefully don’t need to remind you how that whole Columbus Nova situation turned out, but even if you ignore that fiasco, Ham was basically running the show for the last few years before EG7 bought it, and we think that the game cancellations and sunsets, multiple rounds of layoffs, esports scandals, and loss of high-profile devs during his reign speak for themselves.
The Swedish press have apparently been all over the CEO ousting story; MOP reader Justin Hartman alerted us to a Swedish piece on BreakIt that argues Flodin was removed as CEO following a poorly received financial report and a disastrous interview on Dagens Industri, during which he failed to adequately answer questions about capitalized development costs for new games that the company reported to investors, which led to a significant dip in EG7’s stock value as presumably investors lost faith in what they were being told.
Flodin is smiling happily in photographs used in the Q2 investor presentation itself; the presentation claims the “highest revenue and profit in the history of the company” and net revenue growth of “160%” compared to Q2 of last year.
One last curious note here: The Ancient Gaming Noob’s Wilhelm pointed out to us that the newly launched Aliens Fireteam Elite is marked on Steam as being published by Home Focus Interactive, a French company that appears to do largely European publishing. The decision to have Home Focus publish the game in Europe was apparently announced back in June. How is this relevant? Well, Daybreak announced it had purchased Cold Iron Studios back in August of 2020, but then Daybreak itself was acquired by EG7 in December, and as we noted at the time, neither Cold Iron nor Aliens was mentioned by EG7 in its massive investor report. (It’s not mentioned this quarter either.) Although Cold Iron’s Craig Zinkievich did refer to the sale in an interview as late as March of this year, it’s not entirely clear whether the sale was scuttled or Daybreak/EG7’s names and social media prestige were simply scrubbed from the launch in favor of Cold Iron and Home Focus – and as Wilhelm noted, Daybreak deleted its original announcement press release, a trick the studio is apparently becoming quite fond of.
