John Blakely, a nine-year veteran of Sony Online Entertainment and most recently its vice president of development, has apparently left the company for casual-games behemoth Zynga. Blakely's LinkedIn resumé has him departing SOE as of last month to become general manager at Zynga. Blakely had worked on Everquest II and D.C. Universe Online. His departure is another bad sign for a division beset by bad news of late, from layoffs following DCUO's release to the ongoing PlayStation Network breach and outage. Kotaku has commented SOE for official confirmation. More »