PlayStation reportedly closes another first-party studio weeks after Bluepoint, killing Black Ops vet’s AAA project and laying off 50 devs

PlayStation has reportedly closed Dark Outlaw Games, a first-party studio led by Call of Duty: Black Ops veteran Jason Blundell. The studio had been working on a new, AAA IP since 2025. The closure is said to be part of wider layoffs at the company, some of which also affect mobile development.

"PlayStation is closing Dark Outlaw Games, a studio formed last year by former Call of Duty lead Jason Blundell," according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, posting on Bluesky. Schreier adds, "PlayStation is also making other cuts including in mobile development. Around 50 people laid off."

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Little is known about Dark Outlaw's game, other than the fact that it would have been a "AAA console title," according to a job listing. That listing for a senior concept artist created some controversy when it surfaced, since it called for someone with "advanced expertise in using generative AI tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, or similar platforms" to help conceptualize the game.

Blundell is best known as one of the leads behind the Zombies modes for Black Ops. He worked at Treyarch for over a decade before leaving in 2020 to found Deviation Games, which was set to make a new title in partnership with PlayStation. Blundell left Deviation in 2022, and the developer was eventually shut down in 2024 – a few months after he'd founded Dark Outlaw Games as a first-party PlayStation studio.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.