Jason Blundell’s PlayStation studio Dark Outlaw Games has been shut down, Sony announced internally on Tuesday. The Treyarch veteran known for his work on Call of Duty Zombies was tapped to build the studio after the company previously canceled a prior project of his that was part of a publishing deal with Deviation Games.
“I’ve had the amazing opportunity to create a new studio within PlayStation Studios for Sony,” Blundell said just a year ago in an interview with Jeff Gerstmann. “The studio is called Dark Outlaw. We’ve been working away in the shadows for a while, when we’ve got something to talk about we’ll step out into the light.”
He continued at the time, “It’s such a privilege to be able to do it with Sony as a new first-party studio. Sony doesn’t start up first-party studios all the time, so to have that privilege is humbling.”
But it’s become increasingly common for Sony to shut them down. Dark Outlaw Games’ closure comes just a month after the company revealed Bluepoint Games was being shuttered. It adds to the growing list of ill-fated acquisitions during the PlayStation 5 generation.
Prior to forming Dark Outlaw Games, Blundell had co-founded Deviation Games to make a live-service game that would be published by Sony. Sources told Kotaku that the initial budget for that project was over $200 million, but Sony later pulled funding amid a messy development cycle leading that startup to unravel as well back in 2024.
This is a developing story.