A job listing has outed a new PlayStation studio in L.A., which appears to be led by a former Call Of Duty veteran.
Sony has closed down several developers over the past year, including Concord developer Firewalk Studios and London Studio, but it seems the company has been secretly creating new ones as well.
A job listing has appeared at PlayStation for a project senior producer at a ‘newly established AAA studio based in Los Angeles’, which is ‘driven by a team of seasoned industry leaders and experienced game developers’. The project is described as a ‘groundbreaking AAA original IP’.
It’s unclear who exactly is working at the studio, or what it’s called, but all signs point to it being led by Call Of Duty Zombies creator Jason Blundell.
After leaving Call Of Duty developer Treyarch, Blundell co-founded L.A. based studio Deviation Games with Dave Anthony in 2020, which had partnered with Sony to make an original IP. Blundell left two years later, and the studio was officially shut down in March last year, before it had even released a single game.
According to subsequent reports, Sony had formed a new studio with ex-Deviation Games employees. While this was never officially announced by Sony, a former employee at Deviation, JC Farmer, posted on X in December 2023 that they had joined PlayStation Studios as a junior game designer, and that he works for Blundell.
All this context has been highlighted in connection with the new job listing on ResetEra, and while there’s a chance it is unrelated (a bunch of Bungie employees were recently integrated into Sony as well), all the information seems to match up.
Interestingly, a rumour from August claimed Blundell and his new studio had partnered with Destiny 2 developer Bungie for ‘an action game set in a brand new science-fantasy universe’ – something Bungie was apparently working on already. None of this, however, has been officially annouced.
If it is Blundell’s new studio, the dynamics of the whole situation is somewhat odd. Devation Games was an independent studio, which had only teamed-up with PlayStation to publish its first game. It’s unclear what happened for the studio to essentially shut down and re-emerge under Sony’s wing, but a former employee at Deviation previously described issues with certain members of management in a LinkedIn post.
This isn’t the only mysterious studio we’ve heard about at Sony in recent years. In 2022, a job listing appeared for an internship at a new studio in San Diego, which was said to be working with Naughty Dog on a ‘beloved franchise’.
That seemed to imply a new Uncharted game, but neither it nor the studio itself has ever been officially announced.
As for what is officially announced from Sony, Naughty Dog recently revealed its next game as Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, while Insomniac is currently working on Marvel’s Wolverine. The only other confirmed projects are Ghost of Yōtei from Sucker Punch Productions, Fairgame$ from Haven, and Bungie’s Marathon.
Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
MORE: Call Of Duty games cost over $700,000,000 to make – half that of GTA 6
MORE: When does the Squid Game event in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 start and end?
MORE: PlayStation fans discover incredible detail on PS5 controller
