Just received this email from them:
So Long, Farewell, Namárië, Goodbye
Dear all,
The journey we took exactly 5 years ago to change artificial intelligence in games has come to an end. We tried our best, the world changed a bit, and now it's our turn to take a bow and move on. Storybricks is closing down.
Over the past few months we nurtured a desire to go beyond games and find a different vision, one that was more inclusive and could make a difference for a large number of people. This combined with the effect our travel schedule was having on our families made me (Rodolfo) and my co-founder (Stéphane) decide to move onto other projects beyond Storybricks.
It was our own decision and Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak Games) bears no fault for it. Sony Online Entertainment had been up for sale for a long time so our exit had no connection with the Columbus Nova acquisition.
We tried to find a new home for our tech so somebody else would have continued our efforts. I can confirm that Storybricks was for sale, but we did not find an agreement with the buyers we wanted. Since this happened over the course of few months everyone affected has been able to find a new job. Brian 'Psychochild' Green is working on Camelot Unchained, Guilherme Töws is at Mediatonic, Wallace Poulter and Brian Schwab are at Magic Leap (but they can't say what they are up to yet. Super secret stuff) and so on.
Majority of the work we have done is about EverQuest Next and is co-owned by Daybreak. But there are few side projects and a demo that we plan to release for free that are unrelated to EQN. It's nothing major but maybe some Storybricks tech can live in other games. Give us some time to sort that out.
We would like to thank the EverQuest Next team at Daybreak Games, particularly Darrin McPherson and Terry Michaels, for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have worked on a great franchise and alongside such talented people. We look forward to the release of EQN. We would also like to thank Ken Levine at Irrational and Kevin Bruner at Telltale Games (and their respective teams - you know who you are.), the many game developers who have reached out to us over the years to advance a medium that we love, as well as the players who have shared our dream of better storytelling through gameplay and AI.
Stéphane and I are starting a new venture unrelated to gaming but we won't disappear completely. We are looking to hire AI engineers and iOS/Android front-end developers in the SF Bay Area (Sunnyvale/Mt View). Please reach out to me at rodolfo[at]metatron.xyz if you are interested.
Rodolfo Rosini & Stéphane Bura
PS. There is one more story to tell before we part ways.
We fell in love with the EverQuest franchise and we wanted the best possible future for it. We knew Sony Online (300+ employees IIRC) was for sale so Storybricks (barely 10 people) tried to actually buy out the whole division. We retained an investment banking firm as a proxy and they went directly to Sony Corporate bypassing the local executives. We would have been able to raise the necessary capital, and had interviewed new and existing management ready for a turnover.
Alas, it was not meant to be as the terms offered by Sony Japan were unacceptable to us and to our investors. It is my understanding that other buyers had the same reaction and, in the end, Columbus Nova got a completely different deal that the one we were offered, but by then our investor group had moved on.
Make no mistake the company needed cuts badly, and we would have cut and cut deeply. Possibly as deep as Columbus Nova did but maybe we would have cut more senior management and less game developers instead. It was our intention to try to acquire the 38 Studios assets and made them available to players in EQN. Moreover we would have probably changed the server infrastructure allowing people to run their own servers. It would not have been a very canonical EverQuest but we would have done the best to service our customers with the limited budget of an independent studio who wanted to punch above its weight.
We really did try our best. And our best was not enough.
