John Smedley's Twitter and Reddit Accounts Deleted (UPDATED With Smed's Farewell)

If you've enjoyed Daybreak Game Company President John Smedley's social media accounts for its game updates, industry insights, and the occasional rant... well, you're out of luck. They're gone, both on Twitter and Reddit (note "by [deleted]").

Smed's been involved in an ongoing war with hacker group Lizard Squad for some time now, which has resulted in several DDoS attacks against Daybreak's game servers and, most seriously, a bomb threat being called in to a plane that Smedley was traveling on last year.

Most recently, Smedley was critical of the light sentencing given to Lizard Squad member Julius Kivimaki, whom he accuses of being behind the bomb threat as well as participating in the DDoSes and swatting attacks against Smedley. "I want this kind in jail for a long time," he said.

After making those statements, Daybreak's games were hit with another round of DDoS attacks late last week, and Smedley apologized to fans via Twitter that his temper got the best of him and that his harsh statements were probably the reason for the downtime.

We reached out to Daybreak Game Company regarding this matter and received the following response:

"As company policy, Daybreak cannot comment on personal employee matters so they have nothing to add to this story."

That probably means that Smedley deleted the accounts on his own volition, and rules out "Lizard Squad hacking" as the culprit. Rather, it seems more likely that Smedley left Twitter and Reddit so as to control his emotional outbursts, which, as of last week, cost his company revenue, not to mention stressing out the employees who had to work overtime to get things running properly.

Still, it's hard to see this as anything but a victory of sorts for Lizard Squad and similar Internet degenerates who have shown that they can silence a prominent voice in gaming through their efforts. Like him or hate him, Smedley could be informative and entertaining at his best and always seemed passionate about not just his company's games, but games in general.

UPDATE: It looks like Smed did manage to say a farewell on Reddit before nuking that account, and the deletions were his decision alone:

I walked away from Twitter of my own choice.

I really love making games. It makes me happy. I saw Twitter as a great way to talk 1-1 with players which I love doing. I'm simply not going to let this make me lose focus....but I am going to walk away from Twitter and not miss it for a second. Life's too short to let things distract me from what I really like doing. I will miss the interaction with our players though. A great deal.

Smed