Earlier this week, Sony shuttered another of its first-party studios, Dark Outlaw. While we've seen an unfortunate trend of Sony-owned studios closing, particularly those developing live-service games like Concord developer Firewalk Studios in 2024, it turns out Dark Outlaw was not working on another ill-fated live-service shooter.
The revelation came via Dark Outlaw's former junior game designer, known online as content creator JCbackfire, who interviewed his former boss, Jason Blundell, on his Twitch channel last night (March 25).
While the pair couldn't go into details, presumably due to confidentiality clauses, JC said that he was "excited to go to work every single day, which is an absolute blessing," and he "wouldn't change" his time at the studio "for the world," even though the closure "sucked."
"What happened at the end of that day, we all went down to the pub — sorry, the bar. I'm in America," UK-born Blundell said. "They went down to the bar and there was a lot of hugs. It was a team of top-class professionals. All disappointed. We're all disappointed, but the connections, the relationships, the things that we built... that's the professionalism.
"These things will come. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. These things happen, but pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go again. But we're going to mourn what could've been, 'cos we were making a hell of a game."
JC then talked about the game itself — not just the one in development at Dark Outlaw, but also in Blundell's prior shuttered studio, Deviation. Again, the pair were hesitant with the details due to non-disclosure agreements — "we have to respect confidentality, so we can't go into every gory detail" — but insisted to JC's audience that "you would have really liked what we were doing. What a shame."
"I loved the type of project we were working on," JC said, reflecting on the work the studio had done to date. "It wasn't a live service game. Personally I was really stoked about just making something focused and just something I really wanted to make.
"I wish I could talk more about it, but we have to respect it a little bit," he added. "But yeah. The team dynamic is the thing I'm going to miss the most, I think. And I would do anything to get that back."
At this point, Blundell jokingly reminded JC that the team was "still alive" and "the phone still works."
Interestingly, we did get a clue as to what the game may have entailed. When asked what "genre" the game was, Blundell was a little coy, but responded: "I think it's fair to say that the kind of person who would ask that question would probably be the kind of person who would enjoy the kind of game we were making." Which leaves us thinking that it more than likely could've been a FPS, perhaps even a zombie shooter, given Blundell's experience at Activision.
"I've worked in the industry now for five years. Half a decade of my life, I worked on projects that have now — and you guys don't even know," JC added. "You don't even know what I've done with my life for five years."
Though not explicit, JC's words intimate that everything he's worked on for the last five years has been cancelled before announcement, which is likely why Blundell then added: "And that means you get your official 'I'm a developer' badge."
"From the outside world, it's frustrating, right," Blundell added, "because we were going to do something, we were going to get it out. The fans are then disappointed, you're disappointed, because you were working there, dreaming of the product. Something starts coming to life and you start getting excited and it's then it's like: boom. 'Oh. What happens now?'
"But sometimes things have to end. That's how we get new beginnings, right? I don't want to get too philisophical about it, but that happens all the time. The games industry is a creative arts, like TV, like movies, like comics. You're crafting something, and you rely on patrons [publishers and investors] to move that forward, and sometimes things change. The world changes, right?"
Blundell added that he held no ill-will to Sony or PlayStation. "I have a huge gratitude and thanks to Sony. I know everyone looks for the drama, but what amazing people. They absolutely backed us up and supported us all the way through that process. And they were there all the way through. Now, you know, when things change — [it's just] business, you got to deal with it, right? Our responsibilities as the artists, our responsibility as creatives is to dust yourself off and get back up and get going again."
Sony announced it had established Dark Outlaw almost a year to the day before it closed it down. It 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, particularly Zombies mode — founded Deviation Games in June of 2021 with fellow Treyarch veteran Dave Anthony. He left in 2022, layoffs took place in 2023, and in 2024, Deviation similarly shut down before it could announce its project. Dark Outlaw was announced in 2025.
Sony has closed a number of studios and canceled a number of games in recent years. In February, it closed down Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus Remake studio Bluepoint Games. A live-service God of War game and an unannounced project at Days Gone developer Bend Studio were scrapped last year. It later suffered a round of layoffs. And in 2023, Naughty Dog officially abandoned work on a live service multiplayer version of The Last of Us. Sony has yet to comment.
Image credit: Twitch.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
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