The developer states that its ending relationship with Daybreak is not to blame.

In a surprising newsletter this evening, Storybricks announced that it will be closing its doors.

Mostly known for their recent work on EverQuest Next's AI with Sony Online Entertainment, the studio cites that the decision was their own 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."

The team did try to sell Storybricks to undisclosed interested parties, but no agreement was met. During that time, all affected employees found new jobs.

Storybricks states that most of their work was for EverQuest Next and therefore is co-owned by Daybreak Games. Side projects unrelated to EQN they plan to release for free later on in the hopes that "maybe some Storybricks tech can live in other games."

You can read Storybricks's full statement here and tweet your farewells to the team over on Twitter.

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.

Ann "Cyliena" Hosler, Managing Editor