Leaderboard: What’s the most vulnerable Daybreak MMO in 2022?

It’s time for another annual tradition: examining Daybreak’s prospects. We started back in 2015, when Sony cast off SOE and it was reshaped as Daybreak… and purged games and staffers in the process. Subsequent years have brought the total to somewhere around 20 closed games, with multiple studio spinoffs, the pickup of Standing Stone, the buyout by EG7, and too many rounds of layoffs and canceled games to count, to say nothing of the whole Columbus Nova mess in 2018. It was all extremely frustrating since readers will recall that SOE was once so beloved for rescuing lost MMOs that it won best studio four years in a row.

In any case, 2021 year wasn’t the worst for Daybreak at all, as its parent company has teased not only a new Marvel MMORPG but major content for DCUO and – bewilderingly – a console and graphics upgrade for LOTRO. Daybreak even added a game to its publishing roster: Magic: The Gathering Online.

So here’s where we stand at the top of 2022. Spoilers, I picked DCUO for the header pic because I don’t think it’s even remotely in danger. Also, cartoon bees. But maybe you think otherwise.

• In 2015, you picked Dragon’s Prophet. It sunsetted later that year.
• In 2017, you picked PlanetSide 2. It’s still doing great, thank goodness.
• In 2018, you picked Just Survive. It’s dead with no real prospects since the CEO who teased a revival was ousted in 2021.
• In 2019, you picked the unannounced EverQuest game, what we usually refer to as EverQuest III around here. Still no hard news on that – and it wasn’t mentioned as even a long-term project in the 2021 investor call that spilled the beans on everything else.
• In 2020, apart from “all of the above,” you picked PC H1Z1 aka Z1 Battle Royale, which is technically alive, in maintenance mode if we’re being generous.
• And in 2021, you chose Z1 Battle Royale again. I do note here that “all of the above” got barely any votes last year compared to 2020, which suggests to me that a lot of you have significantly more hope for the company’s stable with EG7 running the show, though of course Daybreak’s CEO is now running EG7, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

Let’s hop to the polls for a seventh round, especially now that we know Dimensional Ink is building another Marvel MMO: Which Daybreak MMO do you think is most vulnerable now?

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