Planetside 2 Creative Director Matt Higby resigns from Daybreak

More important members of staff are leaving the company formerly known as SOE (now Daybreak,) as Planetside 2 Creative Director Matt Higby steps down.

He announced this news in a thank you to the Planetside 2 reddit community, and says that the reorganisation “provided the right opportunity for me to exit.” Based on that comment, this would appear to be a voluntary resignation (presumably part of a “we’re letting people go, does anybody want to leave of their own volition?” type process,) rather than an enforced lay-off.

Daybreak has already laid off an unknown number of employees from its Austin and San Diego studios, after the company was bought by “investment management” firm Columbus Nova. The departing staff included EverQuest’s David Georgeson.

Higby says that Planetside 2 is still “in great hands” and stresses that it wasn’t just him making the game single-handedly: “I just was lucky enough to be able to play a role on a TEAM that made the game. A lot of that team is still there, still working their asses off.”

That’s putting on a brave face, but further down the reddit thread linked above there’s confirmation that programmer Ryan Elam (Codeforge) is also leaving the Planetside 2 team. The loss of a creative director and programmer in the same week is inevitably going to be a significant hit to the team.