The Daily Populous Tuesday March 18th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by gamespot.com and submitted by Dangerous-Expert-298

Call of Duty veteran Jason Blundell's first major post-Activision project was the PlayStation-partnered Deviation Games, but it opened and closed without even announcing or releasing a game. Now Blundell is starting a new company with PlayStation.

Blundell said in an interview with Jeff Gerstmann that he's starting Dark Outlaw Games, which is a new studio inside of PlayStation Studios. "We've been working away in the shadows for a while. When we've got something to talk about we'll step out into the light," he said, as reported by VGC.

Blundell said it's "such a privilege" to be the newest first-party PlayStation studio. "Sony doesn't start up first-party studios all the time, so to have that privilege is humbling," he said.

As mentioned, this isn't Blundell's first go-around with Sony. In 2021, Deviation Games signed a partnership with Sony to create a new IP that would exclusive to PlayStation. Another Call of Duty veteran, Dave Anthony, founded Deviation with Blundell. However, Blundell left the company in 2022, with a round of layoffs following in 2023, before the company closed its doors for good in 2024 without its first game ever even being announced.

There is no word yet on what Dark Outlaw is making for Sony. As for Blundell, he was instrumental in the creation of Call of Duty's massively popular Zombies mode during his time at Treyarch. He worked on a number of Call of Duty games over the years, and he directed 2015's Black Ops 3.

havestronaut on March 18th, 2025 at 04:41 UTC »

Other than Respawn (which was a unique case), every ex cod studio has tanked so far. That machine is too big to build entrepreneurs imo. Just bureaucrats.

bsmithi on March 17th, 2025 at 23:49 UTC »

heh "call of duty veteran" (I know what the intended meaning here is behind the word, just funny to imagine some gamer calling themselves a veteran for fighting in video game wars)

Rhym on March 17th, 2025 at 21:48 UTC »

> Dark Outlaw

Black Noir.