It started with a message from Sigil Games to all of its employees: "Bring your keys and anything you need for the night" and meet in the company parking lot. Shortly after that, outside in the parking lot, most of them learned that they weren't going to have their jobs any more. "Not 'laid off.' Not 'let go.' But fired," according to one former employee.
On May 15th, Sony announced that it has completed the acquisition of Sigil Games and all of their game assets, primarily the rights to the MMO, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Sony had helped co-publish Vanguard with the company back in January of this year.
According to Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedly, the acquisition came about due to the fact that Sigil had been funding Vanguard by its self and had "a lot of money" that was owed back to Microsoft by the end of April. Courtney Simmons, also from SOE, said that Sony wants to "do right by the game and the people who made it". Sony will been hiring 50, about half, of the former Sigil staff to continue developing the MMO. 50 was about the same size of the SOE EverQuest 2 post release development team. Sony said it has no plans for major changes to the game and hopes to resolve many of the issues that have arisen since the release of the game.
Now for those who have followed EQ at all may find a bit of irony in here. Sigil was founded by a few people who, for what ever reason, left the SOE EQ2 team. They went to Microsoft for money, left them as a publisher to go to Sony, and now, after selling 200,000 copies of the game to date, basically going the equivalent of belly up and have been bought out by Sony, have brought everybody who left back into the fold... Full Circle, right back where they started. A few years later and a few more holes in their pockets.
Source: IGN , 1up , Gamedaily, Kelly's World
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