Former Call of Duty veteran Jason Blundell has revealed that he's leading the foundation of a brand new PlayStation development team called Dark Outlaw Games. As some of you might remember, Blundell left Treyarch in 2020 after working on the first four Black Ops games. A year later, he announced Deviation Games, with the backing of Sony, albeit in an external capacity. Fast-forward another fifteen months or so and Blundell left Deviation Games, too, not long before the studio closed down.
This time, Dark Outlaw Games is being structured inside PlayStation Studios, as Blundell said on The Jeff Gerstmann Show:
I've had the amazing opportunity to create a new studio within PlayStation Studios for Sony. The studio is called Dark Outlaw Games, and we have been working away in the shadows for a while. When we got something to talk about, we'll step out into the light, but you know the story for me is always about the game, not about the studio. The reason why we're not doing a fanfare or shout about it from the rooftops is like, let's get something, right? But yeah, Dark Outlaw Games. It's such a privilege to be able to do it with Sony as a new first-party studio. Sony doesn't set up first-party studios all the time. To have that privilege is humbling; it's really nice. I'm really excited.
We're keeping it kind of low key. We have been going for a little bit of time now. Not gonna really comment about what we're doing exactly, but we're getting the team to gel, getting the ideas clicking and testing those. You know I'm a programmer at heart, so let's test those assumptions. Is it working? Again, we're trying to hit that escape velocity. But again, being asked to do something like this... I get the studio head and director. I'm just gonna keep that side. I got an executive producer this time. But yeah, it's very exciting, and I love the fact that still, at this point in my career, I'm given these opportunities. It's always that desire to, again, you want to put that one extra disc on the wall if you will. Can we bring something to an audience and excite them and get some new IPs? That makes me jump out of bed every morning. We'll be working tirelessly to get that ready.
Dark Outlaw Games is based in Los Angeles. For the time being, the studio appears to be relatively small, at least judging by LinkedIn. However, it's likely to staff up in the coming years. Given the average triple-A development time, we might have to wait until 2027 or 2028 before we get to see something concrete.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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