In a very surprising move, Sony Online Entertainment is leaving the Sony nest after being bought out by Columbus Nova. The New York-based investment company (who currently hold over $15 billion in assets) announced today that they had acquired Sony Online Entertainment. Sony Online Entertainment announced that they will be getting a name change, going by the name of Daybreak Game Company LLC from now on.

SOE/Daybreak had this to say to their community:

This means that effective immediately SOE will operate as an independent game development studio where we will continue to focus on creating exceptional online games for players around the world, and now as a multi-platform gaming company. Yes, that means PlayStation and Xbox, mobile and more!

We see tremendous opportunities for growth with the expansion of the company's game portfolio through multi-platform offerings as well as an exciting portfolio of new quality games coming up, including the recently launched H1Z1 and the highly anticipated EverQuest Next to be released in the near future

It will be business as usual and all SOE games will continue on their current path of development and operation. In fact, we expect to have even more resources available to us as a result of this acquisition. It also means new exciting developments for our existing IP and games as we can now fully embrace the multi-platform world we are living in.

Jason Epstein, a senior partner of Columbus Nova also commented on the acquisition of SOE as well:In its time as a part of Sony, SOE managed to have their name on no less that 33 titles in between its beginnings in 1995 to now. SOE's best known titles include Star Wars Galaxies, the legendary Everquest series, DC Universe Online and Planetside 1/2. SOE had three titles in development before the change in employment, and Daybreak made a comment on the upcoming changes:As for the economical side of things, the details of the sale are undisclosed. One could speculate, that the reason Sony chose to go ahead with the sale of SOE was due to poor performance; for instance, Sony recorded a 60 million U.S. dollars write-off of certain SOE titles last year. With the recent restructuring within Sony, perhaps this move is not all that surprising after all.

Whether that means we'll be seeing Planetside 2, H1Z1 and Landmark on Xbox One will remain to be seen, however John Smedley did make this comment on twitter:

https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/562305663083098112

[UPDATE] Since we posted some more details have become available from SOE Daybreak, as president John Smedley took to twitter to answer some questions. The gist of his posts are this:

Everquest Next is still being developed by Daybreak, Station Cash (a currency used in SOE's games) will not undergo any changes (except for a potential rebranding), Daybreak wants to bring their games to Xbox One alongside PS4, and all their games will continue to run despite the namechange.

John Smedley also answered some tweets directed towards, this one tweet being the highlight:

https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/562348240658370560

What do you think about the news? Are you excited to see future titles by Daybreak on Xbox One? Sound off in the comments below!