Earlier this week, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg broke the news that Dark Outlaw Games, the PlayStation first-party partner studio, had been shut down by Sony. This marked Call of Duty veteran Jason Blundell's second time having a studio shut down by PlayStation, as his former team at Deviation was dispersed in 2024.
While Sony hasn't spoken much about this news, it has been officially confirmed by Blundell himself, who hopped on a stream with JCbackfire to talk about the layoffs. "Long story short, we are unemployed," JCbackfire said (via Kotaku), with Blundell adding they couldn't go into the "gory details" because of confidentiality.
Neither of the developers said what the game was that they were working on, but it wasn't a live-service effort. Considering how averse PlayStation has been to funding new live-service games following certain disasters with the market, it would have been less surprising to know another team working on a live-service effort had been laid off.
"I can reassure you—and it's been reassured to me—it's just times change, focus changes, but the project we were doing and what we were doing, fans would have been very excited," Blundell said. As a veteran of the gaming industry, Blundell seemed to understand the decision to shutter the studio as just one of the caveats that comes with making games for a living.