PlayStation has closed Dark Outlaw Games and cut around 50 positions across the company. The layoffs include reductions in mobile development along with the complete shutdown of the studio formed just last year by Jason Blundell.
Blundell is best known for his work leading Call of Duty‘s Zombies mode at Treyarch during the Black Ops era. He left Activision to co-found Deviation Games, which partnered with PlayStation on an unannounced project. That studio collapsed in 2024 after facing its own round of layoffs.
Dark Outlaw Games was Blundell’s second attempt at building a studio.
The mobile development cuts suggest PlayStation may be rethinking its expansion into that market. Sony has made several attempts to bring its major franchises to mobile platforms in recent years, building internal teams and exploring partnerships.
PlayStation has been reshaping its first-party strategy since 2022 when the company announced plans to launch multiple live-service games. Many of those projects have been quietly scaled back or canceled as the live-service market proved more difficult to crack than expected. Only a handful of live-service games achieve sustained success, making the genre particularly risky for new studios.
The gaming industry has seen waves of layoffs throughout 2023, 2024, and into 2025. Rising development costs, longer production cycles, and market corrections following pandemic-era growth have led to cuts across major publishers and developers. New studios working on unannounced projects have been especially vulnerable to cancellations.
