PlayStation Cancels Fairgames After Its Big Playtest Fell Short
The heist got called off before anyone made it to the vault.
Fairgames is officially dead. PlayStation has canceled the online shooter from Haven Studios, the Montreal team it bought in 2022, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. The game was first revealed at the PlayStation Showcase in May 2023, and it has barely been seen since.
The good news is that nobody is losing their job over it. PlayStation says no jobs will be cut as a result of the cancellation, and Haven "will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios," according to 80 Level.
Why did PlayStation cancel Fairgames?
The short version is that the playtest didn't go well. In an internal email, PlayStation executives Sean Decker and John Doyle said a recent test with thousands of players didn't deliver the results the company expected. They wrote that "player feedback and retention results were mixed and fell short of the goals we had set," as reported by Destructoid.
The executives also pointed to tough market conditions for player-versus-player shooters. That is a very crowded space right now, and new games have a hard time pulling players away from the shooters they already play every night.
What was Fairgames supposed to be?
Haven was founded by Jade Raymond, a producer who helped launch the Assassin's Creed series, and Sony bought the studio in 2022. Raymond left Haven in 2025, so the game had already lost its most famous leader before this week.
Fairgames started as a competitive heist game where teams would break into vaults and fight each other for the loot. Reports earlier this year said the game had shifted toward an extraction mode instead, closer to games like Marathon. Fairgames was also delayed from its original window into 2026 before it was finally canceled.
Is this part of a bigger pattern for PlayStation?
Pretty much. Sony made a huge push into live service games on PS5, and a lot of those games never made it out. Concord shut down within weeks of launching, and other canceled projects reportedly included a multiplayer The Last of Us game, a God of War project and a Twisted Metal game.
My read is that this is the least painful version of a bad situation. Canceling a game is never fun, but keeping Haven's team employed and moving them onto other PlayStation projects is a much better outcome than another round of layoffs. The bigger lesson is that Sony is finally okay with pulling the plug before launch. That costs a lot less than another Concord. (RIP to the vault we never got to rob.)
Are you surprised Fairgames got canceled? Tell us in the comments.
