Ballistic Moon is gone. The UK studio behind the Until Dawn remake was officially dissolved following a Final Gazette filed with the British government in February 2026, ending the company's seven-year existence after shipping exactly one game. No statement from Sony. No farewell post. Just paperwork.
The studio was founded in 2019 by Duncan Kershaw, Neil McEwan, and Chris Lamb, all veterans of Supermassive Games, the team that built the original Until Dawn and essentially invented the modern choice-based horror genre. Sony acquired Ballistic Moon in 2023, which at the time looked like a smart move: experienced developers, a beloved IP, Unreal Engine 5. The pieces were there. They weren't enough.
A Remake Nobody Asked For, Priced Like One They Did
The Until Dawn remake launched on October 4, 2024 at $59.99, and that price tag was the first mistake. The original game was less than a decade old, still playable, and still available for a fraction of the cost. Charging full price for it required the remake to be a genuinely transformative experience. It wasn't. The shift from fixed cinematic camera angles to a third-person over-the-shoulder view removed much of the claustrophobic tension that made the original work, and several reviewers noted that the new lighting, despite being technically superior, actually made the mountain setting feel less unsettling. The OpenCritic score sits at 69 with only 37% of critics recommending it. That's not a mixed reception; that's a verdict.
On Steam, the game peaked at 2,607 concurrent players. That number is almost impressively low for a Sony-published title on a major horror IP. On PlayStation 5, it was reportedly worse: according to True Trophies data, Until Dawn's first-week player count was 28 percent lower than Concord's launch. Concord, the live-service hero shooter that Sony pulled from sale after two weeks. Make no mistake, that's not a comparison anyone at Ballistic Moon wanted to be making.
The studio started falling apart before the game even shipped. Around 40 staff were let go in September 2024, a month before launch, with a smaller group kept on for post-launch support. By December, those remaining 20 were gone too. Insider Gaming reported at the time that Ballistic Moon's leadership was pitching new projects and hunting for funding. Nothing landed. By March 2025 the studio was described as effectively closed, with only its founders possibly still on payroll. The February 2026 dissolution filing made it official.
Credit where it's due to the people who built this thing: the core team came from one of the most distinctive studios in horror gaming, and the Until Dawn IP genuinely has an audience. The 2024 film adaptation, directed by David F. Sandberg, showed there was still appetite for the franchise, even if the movie itself landed with middling reviews and a fifth-place box office debut. The problem was never the IP. It was asking players to pay full price for a remake of a game that didn't need one, built in a way that actively removed what made the original special.
Sony has not commented on the dissolution. Given that they acquired the studio, funded the remake, and published it, the silence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Somewhere in a Sony boardroom, someone greenlit a $59.99 remake of a nine-year-old game and apparently nobody pushed back hard enough. Ballistic Moon's developers paid for that decision with their jobs. The studio paid with its existence.
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