Call of Duty veteran Jason Blundell has confirmed previous reports he’s heading up a new PlayStation first-party studio, revealing it to be named Dark Outlaw Games.
Blundell departed Call of Duty developer Treyarch – where he’d served as studio co-head, as well as game director on Call of Duty’s Zombies mode – in 2020, and was announced to have co-founded a new studio, the Sony-back Deviation Games, the following year.
However, Deviation reportedly ran into a “difficult situation” in 2023, resulting in almost 90 layoffs, and the studio eventually shut its doors last March. But just a few months later, it was reported Blundell was forming a new PlayStation first-party studio from the ashes of Deviation, with “a lot of” former Deviation employees joining him to work on an undisclosed new IP.
There’s been little additional word since then, but now Blundell has confirmed the reports in an interview with journalist Jeff Gerstmann, announcing his new team’s name in the process. “I’ve had the amazing opportunity to create a new studio within PlayStation Studios for Sony,” he revealed. “The studio is called Dark Outlaw [Games and has] been working away in the shadows for a while, and when we’ve got something to talk about, we’ll step out into the light.”
“But you know the story for me is about the game, not about the studio,” he continued, “so the reason why we’re not doing a fanfare or shout about it from the rooftops is like, let’s get something, right?”. Dark Outlaw is still “staffing up”, according to Blundell, but the nature of its first project remains under wraps. “Not gonna really comment about what we’re doing exactly,” he told Gerstmann, “but [it’s currently about] getting the team to gel, getting the ideas clicking right… let’s test those assumptions, and you know, is it working?”
Confirmation of Dark Outlaw Games’ existence and its mysterious new project comes amid a major shake-up at PlayStation Studios as Sony continues to shift away from the live-service strategy announced by former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan in 2022. Since 2023, Sony has pulled the plug on Naughty Dog’s multiplayer The Last of Us game, a Twisted Metal project at the Firesprite, a live-service Spider-Man game from Insomniac, and sci-fi shooter Concord following its lacklustre launch. Additionally, this January brought reports Sony had also cancelled a God of War live-service game and a project by Days Gone developer Bend Studio.
