Jason Blundell, a veteran game developer most known for his work on the Call of Duty franchise, has announced that he’s founding a new studio. The announcement comes following Sony’s abrupt closure of Dark Outlaw Games, which Blundell was in charge of previously. The move was yet another instance in a string of first-party PlayStation studios closing their doors.
Blundell’s most notable contributions to the industry come from Call of Duty‘s Zombies mode, creating the Chaos storyline found in the Black Ops games. He made headlines when he left Activision-Blizzard in 2021 to work for the ill-fated Deviation Games for a little over a year. In March 2025, PlayStation announced that it had brought Blundell on to lead Dark Outlaw Games, which closed down in March 2026.
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Introducing Magic Fractal
During a livestream with former Dark Outlaw Games JC Farmer, Blundell revealed that he’s starting a new studio, MagicFractal. However, little is known about the studio and what it’s working on. The company’s website is essentially a placeholder with a contact form, and Blundell gave no indication of what’s in the works during the livestream. Farmer and Blundell did ask fans to follow the Magic Fractal Twitter account, which is sitting at around 9,300 followers as of this writing, as a show of support for the studio.
Dark Outlaw Studios’ project was unannounced, but Blundell has confirmed that it wasn’t working on anything live service related. Seeing as how the project never saw the light of day, it’s possible that MagicFractal has a solid conceptual base to work from if Blundell is able to use some of Dark Outlaw’s scrapped ideas. Of course, it’s equally possible the team is starting something entirely new, given how litigious the games industry can be.
While it’s a shame that Dark Outlaw Studios shut down in the first place, it’s at least good to see Blundell staying on his feet with a new studio. With the games industry in such a rough state, it helps to have promising upstarts to root for, and given the speed with which Magic Fractal’s social media account has found a following, it seems that gamers are largely on Blundell and co.’s side. With any luck, they’ll be able to maintain that goodwill long enough to see their game release.
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On the other hand, game closures happen all too often, and they’ve been hitting Xbox and PlayStation hard recently. For Sony’s part, if there’s a pattern in the tea leaves of its recent closures, it’s too abstract to say anything definitive about its strategy. Firewalk Studios shut down following Concord‘s failure, while beloved studio Bluepoint Games was shuttered despite launching the lauded Demon Souls remake alongside the PS5’s release. With both live-service and single-player games getting the axe, it seems like Sony is mostly focused on cost-cutting.
One can hope that there are better days ahead for an embattled games industry, but in the meantime, gamers will just have to hope that new studios fill the gaps of those left behind. To that end, here’s hoping that Magic Fractal hits the ground running.
