Fairgame$ Canceled: PlayStation Ends Haven Studios’ Heist Shooter

PlayStation has canceled Fairgame$, Haven Studios’ heist shooter, according to a Bloomberg report on the internal note that ended the project. Sony first showed the game at PlayStation Showcase 2023 on May 24, 2023. It never got a release date.

The note says why. Executives Sean Decker and John Doyle wrote that a test’s player feedback and retention “fell short of the goals we had set”. It also points to rough conditions in the PVP genre, where players fight each other.

Haven Studios is the studio Sony bought in 2022 to build Fairgame$, and it now keeps its staff on support work for other PlayStation teams rather than closing. Nobody there is being laid off.

What players lose is a plan on paper. In the official announcement post, Haven Studios creative director Mathieu Leduc called Fairgame$ “a fresh, modern take on the heist genre,” a competitive heist game for PS5 and PC where you rob the rich with a crew. The post promised more details later and never named a day.

PlayStation has said nothing about the cancellation on its blog or its social accounts, so the story still rests on the memo Bloomberg published. We analyzed PlayStation’s public record for this story: the May 24, 2023 announcement gives no launch date, and neither the blog nor the Bluesky account carries a statement on the cancellation. For players, there is nothing to claim back.

The cancellation costs players nothing concrete: Fairgame$ never had a date, so there is no purchase to undo and no game to pull from anyone’s library. The change is to the team and to what PlayStation leans on instead. Haven’s people stay employed on support work, while other PlayStation projects move on, such as Bungie’s Marathon, which gets a PvE and PvP update on December 8. The catalog is what players get instead, such as November’s PS Plus lineup, and the hardware side is in good shape: the PS5 passed 100 million consoles shipped as of November 10. Fairgame$ was meant to be Haven’s first game, so the team now has no project of its own. The part worth watching is where Haven’s people land next.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report