Sony has canceled Fairgames, the Haven Studios heist shooter it revealed in 2023, per Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. PlayStation says no jobs will be cut. That still leaves three and a half years of hype with nothing to show for it, and another hole in the live-service plan Sony sold everyone.
Update Nov 10, 4:30 PM ET: PlayStation’s own explanation is out, and it’s brutal in its honesty. In an internal memo published by Bloomberg, PlayStation executives Sean Decker and John Doyle said the game was killed after a recent test: “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. Combined with challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game.” Read that again. The servers worked. The live ops team was ready. The part that fell short was players wanting to keep playing it. That’s the one thing a live-service game can’t fake, and Sony found out after three and a half years. Bloomberg also reports the game had been reworked several times over the last three years and was planning for a re-reveal with a new title.
Original article
Fairgames is dead. PlayStation has canceled the online heist shooter from Haven Studios, the Montreal team it bought in 2022, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. The game was revealed at the PlayStation Showcase in May 2023, and after three and a half years it never got a release date.
The one piece of good news in all of this is for the people who made it. PlayStation told Bloomberg no jobs will be cut as a result of the cancellation, and Haven will instead move to support other studios within the organization. In a statement to Bloomberg, PlayStation said Haven “will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities.” That matters, and nobody should be cheering for developers to lose work. But a studio that was bought to build its own big multiplayer game is now being moved into a support role, and that tells you exactly how this project went.
A long road to nowhere
Fairgames was supposed to be a flagship. Haven was founded in 2021 by Jade Raymond, the producer behind the original Assassin’s Creed and the former head of Google’s Stadia game studios, and Sony snapped it up a year later as part of its big live-service push. The pitch was competitive heists: teams breaking into high-security locations, stealing the goods and fighting rival crews to get out.
Then the game mostly disappeared. Raymond left Haven in 2025, and in February of that year the game was reported to have slipped to 2026. That summer, analyst Michael Pachter claimed on his podcast that Fairgames was already canceled, then walked it back, saying, “I misspoke. Said Jade was let go, and assumed it was cancelled. I have no info on the game at all.” This September, a closed playtest for an unannounced competitive shooter called “Project Espresso” showed up on the playtest site Player.GG for PS5 and PC, requiring a PlayStation account. Its description of teams racing “to infiltrate high-security locations, steal valuable cargo, and make it out before their rivals” matched Fairgames closely, and plenty of people took it as a sign the game was finally getting close. Two months later, it’s gone, and the memo makes clear a recent test with players is what sealed it.
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Sony’s live-service plan keeps shrinking
This is where it stops being one game’s story. Sony told the world it was going big on live service, and the results keep stacking up the wrong way. Concord launched in August 2024 and was pulled offline about two weeks later, and Sony closed its developer, Firewalk, that October. Before that, Naughty Dog shelved The Last of Us Online in 2023. In January 2025, Bloomberg reported that PlayStation had canceled two more unannounced live-service projects at Bluepoint and Bend Studio. Now the 2023 Showcase’s big new multiplayer IP joins the list.
PlayStation fans will say this is Sony being disciplined, and the memo backs that up: it tested the game, the numbers missed, and it pulled the plug rather than ship another Concord. That’s a fair point, and canceling with no layoffs is a better way to do it than most of the industry manages. But discipline would have shown up years earlier, before an acquisition, a public reveal, a delay and a public playtest. Cutting losses late is still losing.
Compare that with the other side. Xbox’s first-party studios are shipping. Gears of War: E-Day is out, and just today Obsidian dated The Outer Worlds 2’s first DLC for December 2. Xbox is spending this week stacking news about what’s coming. PlayStation is spending it explaining what isn’t.
PlayStation hasn’t said which studios or games Haven will now support. If you were holding out hope for a PlayStation heist shooter, the answer is in, and it’s not the one you wanted. It is what it is.
Image: Haven Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment
Sources
- Bloomberg (Jason Schreier): PlayStation Cancels Online Shooting Title ‘Fairgames’
- X: Jason Schreier on the Fairgames cancellation
- GameSpot: Sony cancels live-service PS5 game Fairgames, but no layoffs (Decker and Doyle memo)
- Push Square: Sony cancels Fairgames after years of work
- The Verge: Sony cancels live-service shooter Fairgames
- Polygon: Fairgames returns as Project Espresso playtest
- VGC: Footage of PlayStation’s Fairgames allegedly leaks via playtest
- Insider Gaming: Pachter retracts Fairgames cancellation claim
- OnPoint 4 Gamers: The Outer Worlds 2 DLC dated for December 2
