PlayStation Shuts Down Dark Outlaw Games, Scales Back Mobile Strategy

Jason Blundell's track record with PlayStation studios is now 0 for 2. Dark Outlaw Games, announced and formed in March 2025, has been shut down by PlayStation. It was founded by former Call of Duty lead Jason Blundell, best known for the Black Ops series and Zombies game mode, and the studio never publicly revealed its first project.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier confirmed the closure, and also clarified an important distinction about Blundell's history: Deviation Games was not a PlayStation-owned studio but rather an independent studio making a game for PlayStation. Deviation shut down before releasing that game, and PlayStation then hired Blundell to start Dark Outlaw, which was established as a Los Angeles-based first-party PlayStation studio. Sources indicate the initial budget for the Deviation project was over $200 million, but Sony later pulled funding amid a messy development cycle.

PlayStation had formed Dark Outlaw as an incubation studio just one year ago under Blundell. The team was still in the early stages of its project and had not shipped anything when the closure was announced. According to a job listing Sony still had up at the time, the studio was aiming to make "the next groundbreaking AAA original IP" as part of a "lean and highly efficient" development setup.

The studio closure is only part of the story for mobile players. PlayStation will continue to support previously announced titles like MLB The Show Mobile, Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble, and the NCSOFT titles, but stated "outside of these titles, we will be scaling back in this space" to "focus our efforts on a few select high impact projects." That language is a meaningful retreat from where Sony's ambitions were just a few years ago. Since 2021, Sony had been publicly committed to expanding PlayStation IP onto mobile, at one point targeting nearly half of all its releases on PC and mobile combined by 2025. That goal quietly slipped, and now the language around mobile has shifted from expansion to managed retreat.

Reports indicate that PlayStation also made cuts within its mobile game development divisions, with around 50 employees reportedly laid off. PlayStation has described the number as "small," but the cuts are said to span multiple teams across the US and UK, potentially touching several parts of the mobile development operation beyond just Dark Outlaw.

Worth noting for anyone connecting these two headlines: beyond existing titles like MLB The Show Mobile, Ratchet & Clank: Ranger Rumble, and upcoming NCSOFT titles, PlayStation plans to scale back, but there is no clear indication that Dark Outlaw Games was working on a mobile title. The studio closure and the mobile pullback appear to be parallel decisions, not one causing the other.

This marks PlayStation's second studio shutdown of 2026, following Bluepoint Games, which announced its closure in February. For the mobile gaming community specifically, the practical impact is narrow but real: the roadmap beyond the three named projects is now blank, and PlayStation's five-year push to put its IP in your pocket is effectively on hold.