PlayStation’s Dark Outlaw Games Reportedly Shutting Down Less Than a Year After Reveal

Another PlayStation studio appears to be heading for the graveyard.

According to reports circulating via ResetEra and later backed up by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Dark Outlaw Games the first-party PlayStation team founded by former Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies director Jason Blundell is reportedly shutting down.

If confirmed, it would mark a brutally short run for a studio that only really entered the public conversation last year. Dark Outlaw was officially revealed in March 2025, with Blundell describing it at the time as a new first-party team operating under the PlayStation Studios banner. The studio had been “working away in the shadows,” but had yet to properly unveil its first project.

That makes this reported closure sting a little more. Dark Outlaw never got the chance to show what it actually was.

What makes the situation hit harder is the name attached to it. Blundell isn’t just another veteran with a résumé he’s one of the most recognizable creative figures behind Call of Duty’s Zombies mode, particularly during the Black Ops era when that side of the franchise built a near-cult following. There was real curiosity around what a Sony-backed studio led by him might look like, especially as PlayStation continued trying to diversify its internal lineup.

Instead, it now looks like that experiment may be ending before it ever really began.

The wider context here matters too. Sony has already spent the last year making increasingly visible cuts across parts of its games business, and this reported closure seems to fit into that same broader pattern. Reports indicate the shutdown is also tied to wider internal reductions, including cuts in mobile development, with around 50 layoffs reportedly linked to the move.

And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Before Dark Outlaw, Blundell was also involved in Deviation Games, another Sony-connected project that ultimately never crossed the finish line. That studio shut down in 2024 without releasing a game, and now Dark Outlaw appears to be following a similarly frustrating path.

From the outside, it’s the kind of story that keeps becoming more common across the industry: experienced talent, big backing, years of early-stage development, and then… nothing. No reveal. No gameplay. No postmortem worth clinging to. Just another project that disappears into the pile of “what could have been.”

If there’s any real disappointment here beyond the business side of it, it’s that Dark Outlaw felt like one of those studios people were waiting to eventually care about. The intrigue was there. The pedigree was there. The chance to build something strange, focused, maybe even a little old-school under PlayStation’s first-party umbrella that was there too.

Now, it sounds like it may be over before it even started.