PlayStation Shuts Down Dark Outlaw Games and Cuts Mobile Development Staff
- Sagar Mankar
- 25 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Sony has shut down Dark Outlaw Games, a first-party studio that never managed to release a single title, while also laying off staff from its mobile development division.
Dark Outlaw Games was founded in March 2025 by Jason Blundell, a veteran of the Call of Duty franchise known for his work on the Black Ops series at Treyarch.
The studio was formed at Sony's request and was quietly announced by Blundell on a podcast, where he mentioned they had been "working away in the shadows for a while."
Despite that promising start, the studio never officially revealed what it was working on. Now, just a year after it came together, it is gone.
Bloomberg's Jason Schreier broke the news on Bluesky, confirming the closure and noting that PlayStation is also making cuts to its internal mobile development team. Around 50 people have been affected in total across both moves.
According to reports, Sony appears to be pulling back from the mobile gaming space, though previously announced titles are expected to continue development for the time being.
This is not the first time Blundell has found himself at the center of a PlayStation studio closure. His previous venture, Deviation Games, was co-founded in 2021 alongside fellow Treyarch veteran Dave Anthony, again to work on a first-party Sony project. Blundell departed Deviation in 2022, layoffs followed in 2023, and the studio officially shut down in 2024 before it ever announced its game.
Dark Outlaw, which was largely staffed by former Deviation employees, has now followed the same unfortunate path.
The closure fits into a broader pattern that has been building at PlayStation over the past couple of years. Firewalk Studios, the developer behind the poorly received multiplayer shooter Concord, was shut down in late 2024 following the game's catastrophic launch.
Before that, Naughty Dog cancelled its standalone multiplayer spin-off of The Last of Us in December 2023.
More recently, Bluepoint Games, the celebrated studio behind the remakes of Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, was shut down in February 2026 after efforts to develop a live-service God of War game failed to gain traction.