John Blakely, an eight-plus year veteran over at Sony Online Entertainment, has officially left the company to pursue work at Zynga, a smaller developer located in northern California. Blakely’s role at SOE was particularly large, as he was “responsible for building and leading the team in Austin that recently launched DC Universe Online for the PS3 and PC in 5 languages in 22 countries simultaneously”, one of many objectives he was responsible for as the Vice President of Development as stated in his Linkedin profile.
This comes as a particularly large move following the advent of several eye-opening developments at Sony in the past few weeks. As with the PlayStation Network, SOE’s database was also compromised at an alarming level, and only weeks prior to that, a large portion of their workforce was laid-off.
It’s apparent at this point that Sony is in a very tough spot, with several branches of operation being affected by what the company highlighted as “criminal attacks against our networks”. With E3 just around the corner, the next few weeks will be incredibly important if redemption is a goal.
