Sony Cancels Live-Service PS5 Game Fairgames, But No Layoffs

Creative director Mathieu Leduc said in a blog post that Haven was founded with the goal of making games that its staffers wanted to play, and that’s why the team chose a competitive multiplayer game.

“Fairgame$ came from a desire to create a new type of PvP game with emergent sandbox gameplay. We want to deliver a fresh multiplayer experience that rewards creativity and mastery and delivers surprising stories each and every time you play,” Leduc said.

“In a nutshell, this is a thrilling competitive heist game where you join an underground movement to rob the ultra-rich and rebalance the scales,” Leduc said.

As you can see in the announcement trailer, Fairgame$ has players going after billionaires who have “too much money and too much power.” In the trailer, we see a squad of players infiltrating some kind of compound, working together to take down security guards with the apparent aim of sticking it to the man.

“Fairgame$ will give you an opportunity to break the rules as a modern-day Robin Hood, a thrill seeker, or just someone who wants to collect cool loot,” Leduc said. “Trespass inside forbidden locations around the world, fill your pockets like a kid in a candy store and unravel the nefarious plans of untouchable billionaires.”

Back when Fairgame$ was announced in 2023, Sony was in the midst of a huge push and investment into the live-service market. At one point in time, Sony wanted to release 12 live-service games over the coming years (alongside its commitment to single-player games). However, in May 2023, Sony announced that it was halving its planned live-service game output, with management stressing it wanted to focus on quality over quantity. After this announcement, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game was canceled in December 2023.

At the beginning of 2024, though, Sony found its biggest success to date in the live-service market with Helldivers 2–the game went on to smash sales records and become the No. 3 overall best-selling game of 2024 in the US.

In July 2024, Sony’s Destiny developer Bungie announced mass layoffs and major structural changes. A month later, Sony launched the multiplayer game Concord. It had such a dismal performance out of the gate that Sony quickly took the game offline and refunded all players. Its developer, Firewalk, was later closed.

At the end of 2024, Sony confirmed that it canceled multiple projects, including a live-service God of War and another live-service title from Bend.

It was reported in 2023 that PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who left Sony in 2024, had a mandate that Sony’s teams should make more games-as-a-service titles. A number of PlayStation developers were reportedly upset with this, and the blame was said to have fallen not on Ryan but Connie Booth, one of the most important and veteran PlayStation developers, leading to her eventual departure.

Another former PlayStation boss, Shuhei Yoshida, said the chance of finding success in the competitive live-service market was “small,” but his replacement, Hermen Hulst, was given the resources to fund both single-player games and live-service titles at the same time. However, had Yoshida stayed in that role, he said he would have “tried to resist” the push into the live-service market. He joked, “That’s one of the reasons they removed me.”