Sony is reportedly shutting down Dark Outlaw Games, run by former Call of Duty director

Sony is shutting down Dark Outlaw Games, a first-party recreation studio led by former Call of Duty producer Jason Blundell, Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier reports. Before main Dark Outlaw Games, Blundell was the top of Deviation Games, which was an unbiased studio, but additionally occurred to be creating a PlayStation recreation earlier than it shut down, Schreier says.

Dark Outlaw Games had but to announce what it was engaged on, however contemplating Blundell’s expertise with the Call of Duty franchise, it appears doubtless the studio was creating a multiplayer challenge for PlayStation. Blundell was a programmer and producer at Activision earlier than making the soar to Treyarch to work on Call of Duty 3, and he contributed to a number of Call of Duty: Black Ops video games after that, together with serving because the director for the marketing campaign and Zombies mode of Call of Duty: Black Ops III and the profession and Zombies modes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Engadget has contacted Sony for extra details about the destiny of Dark Outlaw Games. We’ll replace this text if we hear again.

The studio’s shutdown is being paired with cuts to employees at PlayStation targeted on cellular improvement, in response to Schreier. Sony has made a behavior of shedding employees and shutting down studios within the final yr, seemingly as a option to retreat from an earlier investment in online, live-service multiplayer games. The firm shut down Bluepoint Games in February following makes an attempt to get a live-service God of War recreation off the bottom. Sony additionally closed Firewalk Studios after the spectacular failure of multiplayer shooter Concord in October 2024. And a yr earlier than that, Naughty Dog officially abandoned work on a standalone multiplayer model of The Last of Us in December 2023.

That leaves Sony with at the very least two Horizon Zero Dawn spin-offs, a co-op recreation from authentic developer Guerilla Games and a MMO from developer NCSoft; Fairgame$, which remains to be in lively improvement despite the departure of Haven Studios head Jade Raymond; Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers 2; Bungie’s Destiny 2 and Marathon; and in case you actually need to stretch, Gran Turismo 7. Sony clearly hasn’t given up on producing on-line multiplayer video games, but it surely’s not laborious to characterize its try and broaden into the house as a catastrophe.