A Bloomberg report says Fairgames, a PvP heist shooter announced by Haven Studios and Sony in 2023, has been cancelled. In something of a surprising twist, a PlayStation rep told the site there will be no layoffs as a result of the cancellation, as Haven will "shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities."
While it was announced three years ago, work on Fairgames appears to have started even further back, in 2021. Just a couple months after her high-profile split with Google Stadia, Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond announced the formation of Haven Studios, which was "working on an unannounced new IP for PlayStation."
In 2022, right around the time former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan was talking about launching 12 live service games by 2025, Sony acquired the studio outright; a year after that, Fairplay was revealed to the world.
But things have not gone smoothly since then. Helldivers 2 was a massive hit, but seven of those planned games were cancelled before release. Of the remaining games, one was Marathon, which endures but has not lived up to expectations, and another was Concord, one of the most famously disastrous game launches in years, which was taken offline less than two weeks after it launched, never to return. A live-service spinoff of the Horizon series, Hunters Gathering, was also reportedly rebooted after negative feedback from playtests.
A partial accounting of canned multiplayer projects:
- The Last of Us Online: cancelled December 2023
- Spider-Man multiplayer game from Insomniac cancelled sometime before 2024
- Twisted Metal battle royale: cancelled February 2024
- Concord: cancelled September 2024
- God of War multiplayer game in development at Bluepoint: cancelled 2024
- Dark Outlaw Games project rumored to be inspired by Doom and Call of Duty: Studio closed in 2026 with no released games
- Fairgames: cancelled October 2026
- Horizon: Hunters Gathering (still in development but rebooted after negative tester feedback)
The Concord catastrophe in particular seemed to shake Sony, which began reversing its live service strategy just a few months later. Fairgames itself looked to be in trouble in 2025 when Raymond departed Haven, reportedly after an external playtest left PlayStation leadership "concerned about how the game was received and its progress."
The Bloomberg report says a more recent large-scale playtest produced similar results. "While the test demonstrated strong operational excellence, live ops readiness and community engagement, player feedback and retention results were mixed and fell short of the goals we had set,” PlayStation executives Sean Decker and John Doyle wrote in an email sent to Haven Studios employees. "Combined with challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game."
The one bright spot to the cancellation is that no jobs will be cut because of it: A Sony rep told Bloomberg that Haven "will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities."
