PlayStation Shuts Down Dark Outlaw Games and Cuts Mobile Division, 50 Employees Laid Off

The PlayStation Studios team is rapidly shrinking and soon after the sensational news about the closure of Bluepoint Games, another team dissolution was announced.

What is known

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier confirmed a rumor, previously shared by a user of the ResetEra forum — Sony Interactive Entertainment is closing the Dark Outlaw Games studio.

Its opening was announced exactly a year ago — in March 2025, and the team was headed by Jason Blundell — a former producer of the Call of Duty: Black Ops series. He led the development from the first to the fourth part of the series, was the campaign design director for Black Ops II and writer for Black Ops III, and was one of the key creators of the hugely popular Zombie mode in Call of Duty.

Dark Outlaw did not release a single game, but it was expected that Sony wanted to get their version of Call of Duty from them, but the project did not even leave the early stages of production.

This is not the first joint failure of Sony and Jason Blundell — in 2021, he opened the Deviation Games studio, which was developing a completely new game for Sony, but soon the developer left the team, and in 2024 the company was closed.

In addition, Schreier stated that Sony is no longer interested in the mobile division and has laid off more than fifty employees in the US and UK. Obviously, we are seeing a continuation of the rejection of the key business ideas of the previous head of PlayStation, Jim Ryan — he saw the future in service games and a multiplatform strategy, but now the Japanese company is choosing a completely different development vector.

Source: ‪@jasonschreier.bsky.social‬