After the unexpected closure of Dark Outlaw Games, bits and pieces have started to emerge about what the studio may have been building, and the early picture does not sound like yet another live-service experiment.

We reported yesterday that Sony and PlayStation had shut down yet another studio that had recently joined the PlayStation Studios family. Dark Outlaw Games was founded in March last year, and almost exactly one year later Sony pulled the plug, long before the team had any real chance to release its debut project. According to studio head Jason Blundell, that project would have been one hell of a game, the kind of thing players would have been genuinely excited to get their hands on.

Blundell appeared on a live stream with JCbackfire, a level designer from Dark Outlaw Games who, like him, is now unemployed. The two spoke about the closure without violating their NDAs, which meant they could not say outright what they had been making, but the way they talked about it left little doubt that they believed in the project. That becomes even more telling because, as JCbackfire pointed out, it was not a live-service game. He said he loved the kind of project they were working on, and that the fact it was not a live-service title was exactly what made it so exciting to him on a personal level. It was the sort of game he had genuinely wanted to make, and one he clearly wishes he could discuss in greater detail.

Neither of them seemed especially bitter toward Sony. What they appeared to miss most was the chance to keep working on that project with the same people and within the same team dynamic they had built. Blundell also stressed that they had not really seen this coming. In his view, the decision did not come from a loss of confidence in the studio’s talent or abilities, but from Sony deciding it no longer wanted to keep going down that road with Dark Outlaw Games. As he put it, times change and so do priorities, but the game they were making would have excited fans. He also added that the best game is the one you have never played.

PlayStation’s change in direction also lines up with the reasoning Sony gave in its only official statement on the matter. According to the company, several strategic adjustments were made in order to ensure long-term stability. That does not make the wider picture look any less brutal. We are not even halfway through the year, and already thousands of developers have lost their jobs, whether through full studio closures or mass layoffs. Dark Outlaw Games, meanwhile, became the second studio under the PlayStation Studios umbrella to be shut down this year after Bluepoint.

Source: WCCFTech