Feldon This news has been making the rounds so we thought we’d address it and season with a bit of perspective.
From Kotaku.com:
John Blakely, a nine-year veteran of Sony Online Entertainment and most recently its vice president of development, has apparently left the company for casual-games behemoth Zynga. Blakely’s LinkedIn resumé has him departing SOE as of last month to become general manager at Zynga.
Update: Sony Online Entertainment has confirmed Blakely’s resignation and departure. In a statement provided to Kotaku, SOE thanked him for “the passion and leadership he brought to work every day and fully support him in his future endeavors.”
Blakely successor is Lorin Jameson, executive director of development for SOE, who oversaw all development teams at SOE’s Austin studio for the past five years.
Blakely had worked on Everquest II and D.C. Universe Online. His departure is another bad sign for a division beset by bad news of late, from layoffs following DCUO’s release to the ongoing PlayStation Network breach and outage.
Development?
Development in this case is not programming but more of a Producer role, marked by fostering and shepherding of ideas into new games from the earliest stages through to [software] development, design, and delivery. Blakely would have been involved early on in the establishment of new properties and games.
It”s unlikely that his departure will have much effect on EQ or EQ2. Further, our understanding is that he was operating out of Austin whereas EQNext is a San Diego project. With SOE simultaneously tightening the reins on future projects and focusing on the next couple of years with EQNext, PlanetSide Next, and Facebook games, along with the cancellation of the Agency and delivery of DCUO, the news is hardly surprising at all.
Further Reading on Blakely’s Role at SOE
John Blakely, Vice President of Product Development for SOE Austin, and Studio Manager overseeing the team producing DC Universe Online.
He was a Senior Producer on EverQuest II, before moving out to Austin a couple years ago to take over the studio, and also to start the project called DC Universe Online.
If you’d like to learn more about John Blakely’s contributions to SOE, there are a few interviews around the web.
Who cares… Just get those dang servers online!
At least its some news other then “Servers will not be up today”!!!
His passion and leadership, eh? On this side of the fence, SOE has been filled with an olympic-size pool of failsauce since, well, EQ2. There had been moments when I thought that EQ2 might actually rise from the muck but they’ve actively worked to sabotage their own success. For me, the final realization that they were beyond hope was the “Lucan’s Art of War” fiasco. The reality is that SOE’s entire stable of MMOs were swirling the bowl. The hackers just pushed the plunger.
Dear Mr. Jamison,
How about we just all pay using a pre-paid card, so you don’t have to take any of our sensitive information, and get back to having some fun in Norrath?
Thank you.
“His departure is another bad sign for a division beset by bad news of late”
Why? The division wasn’t doing roaringly well, so a change to me sounds like a positive thing.
Anyone who got games like EQ2 out gets my respect so he must be pretty good, but maybe the guy just needed to do something different, by why the assumption that any change automatically==bad news.
I think there were more then a few bad decisions made too out there, my guess is this story is really linked to the layoffs earlier this year and the apparent giant change in direction that is underway.
DCUO went from multi-server to 4 mega servers (and I guess a few quiet realms were fixed in the process, but its conspicious that no large amounts of server hardware were freed up as a old fashioned server merge would achieve), that’s a different take on MMO’s then before, and also something that Smokejumper seems to have been happy to do with EQLive and EQ2X.
So far I’ve been liking the direction shown since August last year, hopefully this hack is just a hicup on the way to good things.