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Daybreak Games might have been working on a Marvel MMORPG project before financial difficulties led to waves of redundancies at the studio (via Reddit).
Best known for the EverQuest and Planetside series, Daybreak Games went by the name Sony Online Entertainment before it was subsumed into Inception Acquisitions, LLC in 2015. Almost a week after this announcement, the company divulged that it had laid off an undisclosed number of employees, including several senior developers and project managers. Daybreak Games released games like Just Survive, Z1 Battle Royale, and PlanetSide Arena under Inception Acquisitions, LLC, but financial strains began to appear. Between April 2018 and October 2019, three waves of redundancies shrank its workforce significantly, and the Planetside teams bore the brunt of the October 2019 layoffs.
Daybreak Games expressed regret for the redundancies and explained that the company would be, “doing what we can to support them during this challenging time.” The studio’s “realignment” would “support our long-term vision for the existing franchises and development of new games,” and one Redditor Forestl speculates that one of its abandoned projects was a Marvel MMORPG. Daybreak Games cut its teeth on massively multiplayer online games and it produced DC Universe Online. In 2017, the company was recruiting for art directors, narrative designers, and combat designers to work on an “unannounced AAA title based on a popular world-class IP.” Crucially, the candidates needed experience in “developing massively multiplayer roleplaying games” and live services.
The Redditor claims that former artists at Daybreak Games had concept pieces of Red Skull, Iron Man, and Captain America for this Marvel MMORPG. I reverse image searched these links and Red Skull and Iron Man seem to have been designed by Ronald Stevens—who now works at Hi Rez Studios—but I can’t find who made that Captain America concept. As such, we should take this trail of breadcrumbs with caution. Daybreak Games never formally announced a Marvel MMORPG project, and it strikes me as strange to develop a direct competitor to DC Universe Online which the studio still updates with episodic DLC.
It is interesting to speculate, though, and Forestl theorises that the project is no more due to the unfortunate layoffs at Daybreak Games. Regarding its current games, DC Universe Online will receive Episode 36: Metal Part II this month. This will continue the plotline of Metal Part I and, “feature new and returning heroes and villains, including the Bat-God Barbatos.”
DC Universe Online is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
