Sony Bins Fairgame$, Yet Another Live-Service Shooter That Never Made It Out the Door

Fairgame$ is dead. Sony has cancelled the competitive heist shooter from Montreal’s Haven Studios, three and a half years after showing it off with a CGI trailer in May 2023, according to Bloomberg.

The news broke on Wednesday morning NZ time. The one bit of good news is that, according to Sony, nobody at Haven is losing their job over it.

Why Sony pulled the plug

It came down to a playtest. In an email to staff seen by Bloomberg, PlayStation executives Sean Decker and John Doyle said the test went well on the technical side but players didn’t stick around.

• The memo: “Player feedback and retention results were mixed and fell short of the goals we had set,” the email says, citing “challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre” too.
• The playtest: According to Gematsu, it involved thousands of players and was likely the “Project Espresso” test Gematsu reported on in September.
• The reworks: Haven reworked the concept several times over the past three years and was planning to re-reveal it under a new name, according to Bloomberg’s report as summarised by GameSpot.
• The jobs: Sony says there are no job cuts. Haven “will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities”.

What Fairgame$ was meant to be

Haven’s creative director Mathieu Leduc pitched it in 2023 as “a thrilling competitive heist game where you join an underground movement to rob the ultra-rich and rebalance the scales”. Crews of players would break into billionaires’ compounds and fight other crews for the loot.

• Platforms: PS5 and PC.
• The studio: Haven was founded in 2021 and bought by Sony in 2022, before it had released a single game.
• The founder: Haven was set up by Assassin’s Creed producer Jade Raymond, who left the studio in 2025, according to Kotaku.
• The trail: After the reveal, things went very quiet. Kotaku says we “really haven’t heard much about the game” since.

Sony’s live-service graveyard keeps growing

Fairgame$ isn’t the first of Sony’s forever games to die before it got going, and it won’t be the last. Here’s the short version, according to GameSpot.

• 2023: Sony halved its planned live-service output, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game was cancelled that December.
• 2024: Concord launched in August, was pulled offline almost straight away with refunds for everyone, and its studio Firewalk was later closed.
• Late 2024: Sony confirmed it had cancelled a live-service God of War and another live-service game from Bend.
• The one win: Helldivers 2, which became the third best-selling game of 2024 in the US.

Big-name cancellations are piling up this year. EA binning the next Mass Effect is still sparking petitions and billboards, and more PlayStation news lives on our PS5 page.

Our take

Credit where it’s due: nobody at Haven is getting the boot, which is more than most studios get when a game is cancelled. Sony deserves a nod for that.

But this is the same bloody story again. Buy a studio before it ships anything, chase the live-service gold rush, then quietly bin the game years later when the playtest numbers come back.

“Challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre” is corporate for “the market is full”. If your pitch is rob billionaires, but online, you needed more than a slick CGI trailer to get anyone off Fortnite and Call of Duty.

Will you miss a game you never got to play? Come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord. Everything else lives on our Fairgame$ page.

Sources

• Gematsu: Fairgame$ canceled
• GameSpot: Sony cancels live-service PS5 game Fairgames, but no layoffs
• Kotaku: PlayStation cancels Fairgames after years of silence
• Haven Studios: Introducing Fairgames, a competitive heist experience coming to PS5 and PC
• PlayStation (YouTube): Fairgame$ – CGI Reveal Trailer