John Smedley is stepping down as president and CEO of H1Z1 and Everquest publisher Daybreak Game Company.

Daybreak told GamesBeat that Smedley’s replacement will be COO Russell Shanks.

“I can confirm that John Smedley will be taking some time off from the company for the near-term and transitioning to a different role to be determined,” a spokesperson for Daybreak told GamesBeat.

The news comes a couple of weeks after Smedley issued a veiled threat to Lizard Squad member Julius "zeekill" Kivimaki, who was found guilty of 50,700 charges related to computer crime.

Former Sony executive Smedley, whose plane was grounded last year thanks to fake terrorist threats from Kivimaki, said the hacker was "a sociopath and will get what's coming to him".

Lizard Squad attacked Daybreak’s servers with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, taking games including H1Z1 and Planetside 2 offline.

Early in his career, Smedley had a hand in the creation of early MMO EverQuest, and later worked at Sony Online Entertainment on Star Wars: Galaxies, EverQuest II, and The Matrix Online.