There’s reason to believe that Sony closed a game studio, just to start over with the same people.
Deviation Games was founded in 2021 by several former staff members at Activision who worked on the Call of Duty franchise. Among those Call of Duty veterans was Jason Blundell, who notably worked on the original three Call Of Duty Black Ops games and went up the ladder to be one of the heads of Treyarch. Blundell is particularly known for making narrative campaigns with several parallel threads going on at the same time, as well as his use of morally grey characters.
Deviation would partner with Sony on what was rumored to be a big online multiplayer game, but in 2022, Blundell departed Deviation for undisclosed reasons. Earlier this month, word spread that Deviation Games had closed, shortly after most of their employees were laid off.
That takes us to today, as Tech4Gamers reports that Sony is hiring new staff at a newly formed studio in LA. They believe that the job listings indicate that they are working on a new co-op game, based on Unreal Engine 5, and based on a completely new IP. They also speculate that it could be a hero shooter, as listings are looking for developers who can design things like weapons, player abilities, and traversal.
But the most interesting claim is the speculation that Jason Blundell is working on this game. There is nothing in these listings that indicate that Blundell is working in Sony’s LA studio, but it has been known that Blundell started working for Sony in 2023. At the time, there was speculation that Blundell was helping Bungie, so it’s important to emphasize here that Sony has yet to reveal what Blundell is working on for the company.
But since that speculation is going around, we will also bring up a theory of our own. While it appears that Deviation Games was launched as an independent company, it seems that their partnership with PlayStation in 2022 meant that Sony was funding them for at least two years. Sony didn’t acquire Deviation Games, but Deviation may have become reliant on their funding, as they have no other projects.
So, it’s entirely possible that Sony allowed Deviation Games to shut down so that they could rehire Blundell, and maybe other Deviation Games and former Call of Duty staff, to work at their new LA studio. If this is what happened, it would certainly be a huge waste, as Sony would have indirectly made even more layoffs happen in the industry. On the other hand, this may have been a situation where Deviation Games became difficult to work with, and Sony wanted to single out the people at the company they wanted.
But then again, it’s possible that PlayStation’s LA offices aren’t making the game for themselves, and are doing support for one of Sony’s other projects. And it’s possible that that game hasn’t even been announced yet. At least what we do know for sure is that Sony isn’t done making live service games at all, and they’re now looking for former Call of Duty developers to help them get there. But we’ll see what Sony ends up announcing.
