PlayStation Cancels Live-Service Heist Shooter, Fairgames

Fairgames, a live-service heist game from PlayStation's Haven Studios, has been canceled by Sony.

A new report from Bloomberg reveals that Fairgames has been scrapped, three and a half years after its announcement. Developer Haven Studios will not be shut down, nor will there be any layoffs, as PlayStation has decided to turn the team into a support studio for other first-party projects. The decision to pull the plug on the game was made after a recent test did not meet internal expectations.

“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,” said executives Sean Decker and John Doyle in a note reviewed by Bloomberg. “Combined with challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game.”

The test being referenced here is likely one that made some waves earlier this fall. A mysterious game known as Project Espresso, which looked a lot like Fairgames, began advertising private playtests with a gameplay trailer back in September. Not much is known about those tests, but they didn't seem to be very fruitful for the team.

Fairgames was announced in 2023 and has been the subject of scrutiny for some time. Some fans pushed back on PlayStation's live-service pivot during the early 2020s, as the company has always excelled with blockbuster single-player games. When Concord bombed, fans began to express even further revulsion toward titles like Fairgames. The project has also been soured by a number of setbacks, including departures of key developers and internal struggles.

Fairgames' cancelation marks yet another major failure for PlayStation's live-service efforts. Concord flopped, The Last of Us Online was scrapped, an online God of War game was killed, and Marathon has been struggling since launch. Helldivers 2, on the other hand, has been a big win for PlayStation. There's some hope that maybe Bungie's decision to revive Destiny 2 could be productive, but Sony seems to be moving away from live-service. The only other major live-service game from PlayStation on the horizon is 4:Loop, a new game from JJ Abrams' studio, Bad Robot. We'll see if it suffers a similar fate as these other titles.