2026 has been off to an awful start when it comes to the health of the games industry, despite consumer spending holding up in the face of increasingly global pressure. Sony and PlayStation haven’t escaped the layoff-related drama, with the most recent waves of layoffs affecting even the renowned remaster and remake studio Bluepoint Games.
Yesterday, 24th March, we learned Dark Outlaw Games – a studio founded barely a year ago – is being shut down, too. Call of Duty veteran Jason Blundell was leading the development efforts at the new company before Sony pulled funding from the studio. ResetEra user J-Soul first broke the news that a new project was “still in the early stages” when SIE decided to close the fresh “incubation studio.”
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier later confirmed the report, adding: “PlayStation is also making other cuts including in mobile development.” Around 50 workers have been affected by these additional cuts. According to J-Soul, PlayStation will be moving away from the mobile game market, though previously announced titles will continue their journey (at least for now). This doesn’t seem to affect external collaborations like the one with NCSoft for an online Horizon game.
Circling back to Dark Outlaw Games and Blundell, that’s the second studio with the CoD veteran at the helm that’s been shut down recently. Deviation Games came to be in 2020 and started work on a “groundbreaking triple-A” original IP. By late 2022, the co-founder was out and set to join Sony Interactive Entertainment. In March 2024, it was revealed Deviation had closed its doors.
These new moves by Sony and the PlayStation division add to the growing suspicion in media and player circles that the next generation’s creative efforts might feel more traditional when compared to the live service-heavy vision that’s covered almost the entirety of PS5’s (still ong-oing) life cycle.
With live-service projects cancelled left and right following Concord’s catastrophic failure and an overcrowded online game market that’s slowing down even for whales like Fortnite, the message here seems to be that PlayStation is returning to a busier cadence of huge exclusive releases, or at least that’s the intention. Expect a thinner PC strategy as a direct result of all this as well.
