PlayStation has reportedly canceled Fairgames, the long-in-development live-service shooter being made by Haven Studios, which Jade Raymond founded in 2021. Sony acquired Haven in 2022, and in 2025, Raymond left the studio, though it remained dedicated to developing Fairgames without her. It seems the story of Fairgames is now over, according to a new Bloomberg report.
The publication reports that PlayStation will not enforce any job cuts or layoffs as a result of Fairgames’ cancellation, which comes as a surprise, and the studio will instead shift to support other first-party teams under the PlayStation umbrella. According to Bloomberg, this cancellation comes after a recent test of the game that allowed “thousands of players” to check it out did not deliver the results PlayStation wanted.
“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 to employees today, according to Bloomberg. “Combined with challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game.”
This doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. PlayStation announced Fairgames back in 2023 and hasn’t shown much since, leaving many to assume development has been struggling behind the scenes. Since then, PlayStation has pulled back heavily on its live-service plans, which originally included launching more than 10 live-service games by March of this year. Naughty Dog’s Last of Us multiplayer game was canceled, Bungie ended active development on Destiny 2, and live-service Horizon spin-off Hunters Gathering is reportedly being overhauled following poor playtest feedback, amongst other stories. Reading between the lines, many fans were waiting for news like today’s cancellation of Fairgames to drop.
Still, in an era where games are canceled and entire teams are laid off (sometimes even after releasing a successful game), it’s nice to see Haven employees are not facing layoffs.
[Source: Bloomberg]
