PlayStation Reportedly Shuts Down Another First-Party Partner Studio

PlayStation has reportedly shut down Dark Outlaw Games, a studio hired by the console maker to make an unknown first-party title, as well as laid off a number of other individuals involved in mobile development.

This comes from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who posted the news on Bluesky today. Dark Outlaw Games was founded by Jason Blundell at Sony’s behest, and was only quietly announced by Blundell on a podcast in March of last year after having been rumored the year before. At the time he said they had been “working away in the shadows for a while,” and noted that it was on a first-party project for Sony, but the studio never officially announced what its project was.

Dark Outlaw was staffed with a number of former members of Deviation Games, Blundell’s previous venture. Blundell, a veteran of Activision and Treyarch on Call of Duty, founded Deviation Games in June of 2021 with fellow Treyarch veteran Dave Anthony, similarly to work on a first-party Sony project. Blundell left the studio in 2022, layoffs took place in 2023, and in 2024, Deviation similarly shut down before it could announce its project.

Schreier notes that this decision seems to have come from Sony, which has also laid off a number of individuals in mobile development internally, with roughly 50 jobs lost overall.

Both Deviation and Dark Outlaw fall into an ongoing pattern of Sony’s closure of first-party studios, which has also recently included Concord developer Firewalk Studios in 2024, and Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus Remake studio Bluepoint Games just last month.

IGN has reached out to Sony for comment.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].