EG7’s 2023 annual report claims Daybreak and SSG collectively count 264 staffers

Swedish gaming conglom EG7 released its annual report this week, and while there isn’t a ton of new-new in it for those of us weirdos who care about Daybreak’s MMORPGs and dig into each quarterly investor report as it releases, there are still some tidbits worth highlighting.

EG7 reiterates that Big Blue Bubble’s My Singing Monsters is still making absurd amounts of money, that it shuttered AntiMatter Games, that it suffered 12 cyber attacks in the last two years, that its staffing is heavily male, that Jason Epstein is still chairman, that its stock did not have a great year, and that Daybreak has only 264 workers across all its MMORPGs.

Wait, what? Yes. On page 4 of the release, EG7 includes a world map with headcounts for every single one of its substudios. Thanks to this chart, we know Daybreak collectively counts 204 people plus 60 more at Standing Stone.

Worth noting here is that 27 of those people are listed as supposedly working for Rogue Planet, which seems like kind of a big number given PS2’s recent history. (OK, they typed Rouge Planet, far from the only typo in this international corporate memo, but cue snickers anyway). So we’re not sure what those 27 people are working on as earlier this year Daybreak transferred development of PlanetSide 2 over to Toadman after selling the IP – a move and sale mentioned absolutely nowhere in this report even in passing. EG7 also lists PlanetSide 2 under Daybreak’s accolades list, which I guess was true for most of 2023 but certainly isn’t now when this memo is out. And there’s a sad entry for H1Z1 touting its 40M lifetime players as if H1Z1 were a going concern and not just… a huge failure to manage and capitalize on 40M lifetime players.

Acting (yes still Acting) CEO Ji Ham calls it “another year of record growth when considering [EG7’s] collective performance, in spite of Daybreak’s setbacks. “This year marked a notable shift, as Big Blue Bubble temporarily surpassed Daybreak as the leading profit contributor,” Ham says. “Facing challenging comparisons to MSM and its exceptional performance, as some of Daybreak’s titles performed below expectations, largely due to delayed content releases. Consequently, Daybreak’s results for the year fell 9.3 percent year-over-year.”

As we’ve previously covered, in the Q4 investor report Ham mentioned that DC Universe Online’s sluggish native PS5 release was chief among those delays, though that came on the heels of layoffs for Dimensional Ink and little obvious marketing spend to support that release when it did arrive earlier this year, which makes the whole narrative hard to chew.