In an increasingly dark day for video games, Sony’s disastrous leadership of first-party studios has taken yet another casualty.
Dark Outlaw Games, led by Treyarch veteran Jason Blundell and officially acknowledged last year, has been shuttered before it can even ship a game.
Many of you will recall that the Los Angeles-based studio was born from the ashes of Deviation Games, a studio partnered with PlayStation and working on a first-party project before it was closed a couple of years ago.
It continues a dreadful decade of Sony decision making, which has seen it acquire and shutter a slew of studios, including most recently Bluepoint Games.
Here’s a list of all PlayStation first-party studio closures since the PS5’s launch year:
- 2020
- Manchester Studio
- 2021
- Japan Studio
- 2023
- PixelOpus
- 2024
- London Studio
- 2024
- Firewalk Games
- 2024
- Neon Koi
- 2026
- Bluepoint Games
- 2026
- Dark Outlaw Games
Obviously there’s no attachment to Dark Outlaw Games as we never got an opportunity to know what it was working on, but it continues a disastrous run for PlayStation’s first-party, which has stumbled its way through the PS5 generation.
Blundell’s best known for working on Call of Duty Zombies, so it’s likely Dark Outlaw Games would have been working on a first-person shooter. We know Deviation Games before it was beavering away on some kind of sci-fi game.
Elsewhere, a “small” number of layoffs will also be carried out across the wider PlayStation family in the US and Europe.
As part of this, the platform holder is moving away from the mobile game market, although it will still support previously announced projects, like MLB The Show Mobile and Horizon Steel Frontiers.
Sony has spent years coveting the smartphone gaming gold mine, but has failed to ship anything of note. It’s currently location testing Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble in select regions, although we don’t have particularly high hopes for it at this point.
It’s churned through a number of high profile executives in the space, many of whom it poached from leadership positions at giants like Apple. Now it’s decided to invest elsewhere.