Sony has dug up another plot in its expanding live-service graveyard, and is lowering the still-warm corpse of Haven Studios' Fairgames into the dirt. The shooter, which was revealed in 2023, has been canceled, though PlayStation says there will be no layoffs as a result of its decision to end the project.
"The studio will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities," a PlayStation representative tells Bloomberg, who first reported the news.
Fairgames was revealed in a 2023 trailer which stylized the title as "Fairgame$." The trailer featured no in-game footage, but presented a stylish version of a Payday-style shooter focused on heists. But the game never materialized again. The last major news on the project came in 2025, when Haven Studios founder Jade Raymond – a veteran Ubisoft producer who'd worked on Assassins' Creed – left the company.
Bloomberg reports that Fairgames was ultimately canceled after a poor showing during a recent test session with thousands of players. "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," according to an internal memo.
PlayStation had apparently reworked the game multiple times since it was first revealed, and prior to the test had planned to showcase it again under a new title, according to the report.
While PlayStation once had extensive plans for live-service games, it's canceled so many of those projects that it's now difficult to keep track of them all. The death of Concord just two weeks after launch is perhaps the highest profile example, but that's just the most memorable corpse among an extensive trail of bodies.
A multiplayer God of War title from Bluepoint and a live-service game from Bend Studio were canceled in 2025. A multitude of unannounced projects were iced amid mass layoffs at PlayStation in 2024, including a Twisted Metal game and an original project from the publisher's now-defunct London studio. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us multiplayer game died in 2023. Bungie has reportedly had numerous projects scrapped since it was acquired by Sony. PlayStation has even killed not just one, but two projects helmed by Call of Duty veteran Jason Blundell.
Sony's biggest live-service hit in recent years is certainly Helldivers 2, but it's struggled to replicate that success – heck, it's struggled to release other online games at any scale. The publisher's annual MLB The Show series remains a staple among baseball fans, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls seems to have found a niche among fighting game aficionados, and Marathon is continuing to survive, but these aren't the Fortnite-level hits Sony is clearly gunning for. I guess we'll never know whether Fairgames could've been a hit.
