Earlier this week, reports emerged that Sony was shutting down Dark Outlaw Games, a first-party studio led by Call of Duty: Black Ops veteran Jason Blundell. Today, Blundell confirmed the news on a Twitch stream hosted by another member of the Dark Outlaw Games team, JCbackfire.
“We have to respect confidentiality so we can’t go into every gory detail,” Blundell said during the stream, as highlighted by Kotaku. Neither dev revealed much about the project, but JCbackfire did confirm that it was not a live service game.
Despite promises for extensive live service games, Sony seems to have been backing away from those ambitions in recent years. A multiplayer The Last of Us title went on ice in 2023, Concord had its disastrous launch in 2024, and live-service titles from Bluepoint and Bend Studio were reportedly canceled in 2025.
It’s unclear what PlayStation, a brand that had cemented a reputation for fantastic single-player narrative games before its live service pivot, is building its portfolio around now. But one thing is clear: Dark Outlaw Games will not be a part of the lineup.
“I can reassure you – and it’s been reassured to me – it’s just times change, focus changes, but the project we were doing and what we were doing, fans would have been very excited,” Blundell said. Either way, both Blundell and JCbackfire agree that getting the news “fucking sucked.”
Before Dark Outlaw, Blundell had previously founded Deviation Games, which, while not a first-party studio, was building a game in partnership with PlayStation. He left that studio in 2022, and it was eventually shut down before the game could be released.
“The question will be, ‘Oh, that’s two down. Maybe it’s time for you to retire?'” Blundell mused with a bit of gallows humor during the stream. “You would have to put me in the goddamn ground. And by the way, I’ll do the next one, and when that fails, guess what I’ll do after that? The next one. And you know what I’ll do after that? The next one. And then once they bury me, I’ll still be trying to effing do the next one.”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says latest layoffs will result in “a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks” because the downsizing “wasn’t a performance-based ‘rightsizing.'”
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