LogInDeviation Games’ Louis Castle details lessons learned from the studio closure.
Sometimes, hundreds of talented people can spend years working on a good game at a bad time and then lose it all.
That seems to be the story of Deviation Games. Founded in 2020, Deviation was the product of a decades-long friendship between Dave Anthony and Jason Blundell, veterans of Treyarch Studios, best known for its work on the Call of Duty franchise.
Deviation began with a bold vision, reflected in its name and radiated through its human resources department, which was dedicated to cultivating its unique culture. It continued with successful rounds of funding, rapid growth, a high-profile partnership, and international expansion. Then a founder left. Layoffs followed, the original game’s vision changed, and by March 2024, Deviation was no more.
The story of Deviation Games is one of hope, promise, yeoman’s work, and unrecoverable pivots, a studio shipwrecked in a financial storm, but with a cultural vision so strong that it endures today.
As the only current and now final Deviation Games representative, Louis Castle, summed up the studio’s untimely end in a recent interview, “There are no villains here.”
But there are lessons.
Creating a Culture and a Company
The story of Deviation Games begins at Treyarch.
Los Angeles-based Treyarch was founded in 1996, acquired by Activision in 2001, and became an industry juggernaut with its contribution to the Call of Duty franchise’s tick-tock development.
At Treyarch, Anthony and Blundell gained widespread popularity as writers and design directors for the Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops II campaigns, and for tending to the franchise’s popular zombies mode.
In late February 2020, Blundell announced his departure from Treyarch through a farewell letter published on Treyarch’s official Twitter account.
“Clearly,” he wrote, “I'd be remiss if I didn't personally thank the group that continues to make it all worth it: the Zombies community! Your passion, enthusiasm — and frankly, your craziness — has been a continued source of inspiration. The beauty of Zombies is that it has always been about the interaction between us as developers and one of the most passionate player communities on the planet. These are memories I will cherish for a lifetime.”
Not long after, Anthony and Blundell made a long-shared dream a reality, and Deviation Games was born. Blundell would create and direct games as Chief Creative Officer, while Anthony would serve as CEO and run the business side of operations.
On March 9, 2020, Deviation Games announced on social media that it was hiring, just days before the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Louis Castle, who joined the studio as Senior Vice President of Development in late 2022, the pandemic necessitated a significant shift in development for the new company. It also created a kind of ethos within the company, forged during a time of adversity.
Castle offered “great kudos to Kriste [Stull], especially.” Deviation’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer oversaw instilling and disseminating the strong company culture, including its pandemic-induced travails.
“She did a great job of documenting the history,” Castle said. “So when you came on board at Deviation, there were all these documentaries [like] internal b-roll. There was a whole bunch of stuff that existed that gave you really good insight as to the company's history.”
By the summer of 2021, the studio had grown to more than 100 “Deviators.”
On June 10, 2021, Anthony announced that Deviation Games had signed on with PlayStation to develop a new original IP.
In a PlayStation Blog post, Anthony reflected on how he and Jason Blundell had gotten to this point, writing that during their many years at Treyarch, he and Jason Blundell had a running conversation about creating their own studio. From deep within the trenches, among the world’s highest-profile AAA development environments, they fantasized about building a studio culture centered around community, friendship, and innovation. Video games would always be the consumer-facing product, but it seemed that the studio itself would be their first creation.
“We call ourselves Deviators,” he wrote in the post. “And as Jason describes it, ‘Another way of saying Deviator is Renaissance mindset. Deviators are not only passionate about their own discipline, but they love others, too. We believe that is what is unique and special about our studio, the culture, the team, and this project. From experience, young determined studios need rock-solid support to thrive. That’s why it means so much that PlayStation is partnering with us on our first game. As you all know — having enjoyed the amazing PlayStation Studios portfolio — they know what it takes to make great games. To have a partner like that behind us makes the road ahead simply breathtaking.’”
That same day, Anthony and Blundell also spoke with Geoff Keighley during Summer Game Fest about how even the name — Deviation — radiated the studio’s ethos. They were, quite literally, deviating from the tight controls of big studios. Sony’s funding gave them financial security and time to create their new IP.
“When you are working on those franchises, with long-established IPs, you’re working within very tight constraints creatively about what you can do,” Anthony told Keighley on stage. “So we thought, after all of these years, what if we deviated?
“All bets are off.”
Anthony promised that what they were working on was a groundbreaking new IP with innovation at its core.
From Deviation’s earliest public days, the studio extolled bold virtues, just like Anthony and Blundell once spoke of at Treyarch. “Deviation is not a company,” its official site read, “it’s an attitude. Imagination is our most powerful asset.” The website proclaimed that Deviation was here to go slowly, walking with humility, while loving the work, challenging assumptions, and pushing boundaries. They arrived to “create groundbreaking games and develop innovation that is yet to be discovered.” These founding values solidified to form what they called their creative mission, both in life and in work.
Blundell, Anthony, and Stull did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The Games
Deviation’s initial, pre-PlayStation game project was never publicly unveiled. After the partnership, the studio spent the next year building up the development team from a small group working on early VR and then a non-VR epic title worthy of the Sony relationship.
Castle declined to give specifics about the game, noting that Sony still owns the IP.
Deviation Games’ 100-person headcount would continue to grow, with the studio announcing the formation of Deviation Games Canada in January 2022.
During 2021 and most of 2022, it seemed that Deviation was working as intended. Then, in September 2022, just over a year after the PlayStation partnership announcement, Jason Blundell left the studio he co-founded.
In the announcement about Blundell’s departure, Deviation said that Anthony would remain as CEO and would also now fill Blundell’s former role as Game Director. The announcement also noted that industry veteran Louis Castle, founder of the legendary Westwood Studios, had joined Deviation as Senior Vice President of Development.
The announcement went on to name-drop a collection of other noted developers who had recently joined the studio. Development on the previously announced but unshown, unnamed AAA IP would continue, the announcement said, but it didn’t note why Castle was brought in.
Castle said he was recruited to improve Deviation’s project development processes. Behind the scenes at Deviation, the original game concepts were changing significantly, for multiple reasons, Castle said.
“So there were actually basically two products being developed at the same time — co-developed — and then they got combined into one giant vision early in 2023,” Castle said. “Still under Sony, still under contract, approved by Sony of America.”
Castle declined to say what the other game was or what Deviation combined to create about four months after he joined the company.
Just eight months after Blundell’s departure, in May 2023, Deviation underwent a round of layoffs, according to multiple LinkedIn posts from recently laid-off employees.
Less than a year after that, in March 2024, the studio was no more.
“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Deviation Games,” Deviation Games COO and CHRO Kriste Stull wrote on LinkedIn. “I want to express my deepest gratitude to our entire team. Thank you for all your hard work, dedication, and contributions to Deviation; I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have worked with each and every one of you.
“To all the Deviators out there, we will always cherish the memories we made together. Thank you for being a part of our journey. Go get 'em!”
Deviating at Deviation
Why the studio closed in the spring of 2024 can perhaps be traced back to the troubles that were brewing in 2022.
In September 2022, for the first time in his life, Louis Castle went on vacation without a job. He came back from vacation with an employment offer from Deviation Games.
Castle is an industry veteran whose career effectively spans the entire history of video games. He’s probably best known for co-founding Westwood Studios, developer of the Command & Conquer real-time strategy games. Castle’s resume also includes stints at Amazon Game Studios, Electronic Arts, Zynga, and a video game collaboration with Steven Spielberg that earned him a BAFTA award for the Nintendo Wii game Boom Blox.
He joined Deviation Games just before Blundell’s exit, and the conversation with his new employer started while he was on vacation.
“During those two weeks [on vacation], I got a LinkedIn [message] from Kristie [Stull] saying, ‘We'd really love to have you come to Deviation. Jason and Dave are the founders,’ giving the whole spiel. I met with Dave on a Friday, we had an offer on Sunday, and I think the following Friday, Jason resigned.”
Castle said that those two seemingly related events weren’t connected.
“Dave and Jason wanted to hire me to be head of production and kind of fix a bunch of stuff that just wasn't tracking as well as they would like,” he said. “And so that's what I came on to do. And then Jason had already — I wouldn't say checked out, exactly. That's not fair. But I think he'd already lost a lot of the fire that he had for the company and the business. And you know, he and Dave had been friends forever. So they had a hard talk, and he decided to leave.”
Blundell’s departure created a void at the studio he co-founded. It lost its project leader. Dave Anthony filled the void, and the game that Deviation was creating changed, adopting the preferences of its new director and head of the design group.
“We had a particular milestone in July of 2023, just before I joined, which was really sort of cementing the original idea and looked very promising,” Castle said. “When Jason left … Dave needed to make the game that Dave wanted to make.”
About a month after Castle joined the studio, he learned from Anthony and Sony that the studio needed to make what he described as “a radical change” to the game. He said that original pitch got Sony excited enough to invest in the studio, in part because it filled a market gap. But as Deviation worked on the game, Sony made other acquisitions, and Deviation’s game was similar to products Sony had acquired. In short, someone else filled the gap that Deviation was slated to fill.
“And so we were definitely duplicative when it came to the potential successes that Sony might have,” Castle said. “Ultimately, the game they were most worried about failed, so we were maybe vindicated in some way that we might have been the better bet, but you know, 20/20 hindsight.”
Around the time that Deviation was consolidating its two projects into one, another Treyarch veteran, Tony Flame, transitioned from Design Director to Associate Game Director in February 2023, working on what he described as multiple first-person shooter game projects, working with 80-some developers. He would serve in that role until Deviation’s dissolution in March 2024.
The studio pivoted, came up with what they felt was a good idea, and things seemed to be going well again.
“[We were] kind of plugging away, [and] felt like we had everything under control,” Castle said. “And then, lo and behold, Sony had a pretty bad year, and a pretty bad quarter, and they ultimately decided to stop funding.”
As Castle sees it, Deviation Games ended largely because of external financial factors. In its financial results reported in February 2024, Sony lost $10 billion in stock value, in part because of a fiscal year cut in its PlayStation 5 sales forecast. But Castle was quick to point out that Sony was good to Deviation, even under the difficult circumstances.
“It was a bit of a surprise that it came in,” he said. “Certainly, we didn't get any indication it was coming. And then when we did get the news, I would say they went a little bit beyond what they had to contractually, and that's always appreciated.”
According to Castle, after Sony pulled funding, Deviation took the game they were working on around to investors, but they couldn’t find any interest in effectively acquiring a company that necessarily came with the residuals of an existing Sony partnership. They even came up with a new idea for a game, but they couldn’t find a company willing to make the significant investment in funding the year-to-year-and-a-half development needed.
So the studio shut down.
Lessons Learned
Deviation Games never released a game, but the company did leave behind lessons about financial frugality, the danger of pivots, the importance of finding market gaps, the challenge in funding-fueled growth, and the paramount nature of company culture.
Beware of Funding That Incentivizes Rapid Growth
With the benefit of hindsight, Louis Castle sees Deviation’s rapid expansion as a double-edged sword. It worked for the original idea, but it worked against changes to that idea.
“I think there was an awful lot of the structure of the relationship, or the deal was such that it encouraged a lot of growth very quickly,” Louis Castle said.
Based on the founders’ public comments, Deviation always had its sights set on an AAA game. Building big and innovative games requires acquiring and retaining talent, investing a lot of time, and spending millions up front in anticipation of a later return. Deviation’s 100-plus employee count about a year after its founding and its expansion into a Canadian branch reflect that reality. Deviation was a startup. It hadn’t shipped a product, and its rapid expansion increased its burn rate and depleted its cash reserves.
“[The] takeaway is be very careful about how the funding agreement is with your financiers, whether it's a VC or a publisher, because sometimes it can be in the best interests of a developer to grow more quickly than they should,” Castle said. “And I think that was definitely a takeaway because our burn rate was really, really high.”
Avoid Dramatic Pivots
Chief Creative Officer Jason Blundell’s departure was a significant loss, and though the original PlayStation project’s pivot may have been conceived as a way to salvage the studio, the decision created its own problems.
Castle points to the post-Blundell shift in the product as an inflection point. In short, the game changed too dramatically for the studio or its backers to sustain.
“[If] the original product that you are building and you have confidence in and you really like looks to be having competition internally or externally, changing the direction of a project is rarely a good idea, at least dramatic changes,” he said.
“Small pivots are fine, but if you're going to make a really big change in a game, it probably behooves you to go back down to a smaller team size and revisit those assumptions and rebuild your prototypes and get things working, rather than trying to take a behemoth that's flying along and turn it. You know, cargo ships don't turn easily.”
Find Market Gaps
Market gaps come up several times in the story of Deviation Games. The partnership with Sony was designed to fill one. Their pivot was designed to fill one that wound up being duplicative. And their final effort was designed to fill yet another.
Even though those things didn’t pan out for Deviation Games, Louis Castle points out that others filling the market gap can validate good ideas that didn’t get their chance.
“Actually, all three of them — the original PlayStation game, the thing it pivoted to, and the new idea — were all, from a design point of view, very novel, and they were in a space that was a gap in the market that later was filled by a very successful title. And so I think in each case, you could point to Dave Anthony's ability to see product market fit that's not obvious. When he discusses it, when you talk about it, when you look at the data, you go, ‘Oh, wow! That kind of game needs to get made.’ He's very good at sort of sussing that out. He’s definitely a really rich resource there.”
Be Frugal
From the earliest days, Deviation Games faced adversity and had to adapt. From the COVID-19 pandemic arriving at nearly the same time as the company’s founding to successfully securing funding, then rapidly expanding, converging multiple projects, losing a cofounder, hiring an efficiency expert, pivoting significantly, and laying off employees — these seem to have pushed the limits of Deviation’s ability to adapt while remaining fiscally responsible.
Castle’s recruitment to, as he put it, “improve a bunch of things,” was a tacit admission that Deviation Games was struggling with inefficiencies, and they needed to find someone to get them back on track.
“I think we wanted to believe we were frugal, but we could have been more frugal,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “But I think every company, if you have a group of cultural values, you don't always hit them perfectly.”
Create a Caring Culture
Deviation Games’ culture built and sustained the studio and attracted talent like Castle to it. Those cultural touchstones never left the company.
“The espoused values of Deviation were excellent,” Castle said, “and our efforts to live up to them were, I think, adequate to good and could have been better. But again, no fault of the sort of setting the flag or the direction.”
And when they made the decision to shutter the studio, after unsuccessful attempts to shop around a new game, they made every effort to help their employees.
“Even when we closed doors and ceased operations, Kriste Stull got together with a bunch of her friends,” he said. “We paid for people to fly in from all over the country — all over the world — to do a show-and-tell day where the Deviation managers were there with recruiters from other companies to talk and sing the praises of the people that worked there. So all those who participated in that got a chance to meet with recruiters, with their current manager (or previous manager, depending on how you look at it), there to talk about their strengths and weaknesses. We had a really great percentage of those people who found jobs almost immediately in an industry that was very tough to find jobs in at the time.”
Castle’s still working under contract for Deviation because the owners want to settle equitably with their creditors, not just declare bankruptcy and walk away. That’s the culture of Deviation Games operating even today. Its legacy isn’t games. It’s the company.
“Most people just pull the plug and let everybody fend for themselves,” Castle said. “It's just not the way that, thankfully, our owners wanted to go. I know there are some people who are quite bitter, but at the end of the day, I've never seen a company — a group of people that had no reason to do what they did — extend themselves as far as they did, Dave Anthony included. They went over and above. I'm very, very proud to say that, in the worst-case scenario, it was handled the best possible way.”