Raf Grassetti, the art director for Sony Santa Monica’s (SSM) recent God of War duology, has found himself back at PlayStation after Netflix’s big studio closure. On X (formerly Twitter), he revealed he’s started a “new chapter” at fellow A-list developer Naughty Dog.
Grassetti departed SSM last year after he’d spent “over a decade” at the God of War developer. Weeks later, he revealed he was joining Netflix Games’ then-burgeoning studio focused on creating triple-A titles. Codenamed Team Blue, it included fellow industry alums Joe Staten (Halo) and Chacko Sonny (Overwatch), and its team was developing an original project for PC and consoles.
This past October, Netflix closed Team Blue in a layoff wave which affected 35 employees. The developer was a notable startup for the streamer, as it had mainly been acquiring pre-existing indie studios like Spry Fox and Next Games up to Blue’s founding in 2022.
It’s unclear at this time where Sonny and Staten have ended up after Team Blue’s shutdown.
What’s going on with Naughty Dog?
Earlier this year Naughty Dog released a PlayStation 5 remake of The Last of Us Part II. But with its live-service spinoff for that franchise dead, it remains a mystery as to what the famed developer is working on next.
In February, PlayStation laid off 900 employees across its various first-party teams and cancelled multiple projects. Naughty Dog was among those studios impacted, as were Insomniac Games and Guerilla Games.
Still, studio head Neil Druckmann revealed in June that Naughty Dog is working on several single-player projects. While the studio has said little about these games, at least one of them will feature Troy Baker—a frequent Naughty Dog collaborator—in some capacity.