Remember Fairgames, also known as Fairgame$? You know, yet another PlayStation live-service project that seemingly vanished off the face of the earth after its reveal? Well, if you don’t, we can’t exactly blame you. After years of radio silence, Sony has apparently decided to quietly pull the plug before it could become another Concord.
According to Bloomberg’s report, PlayStation has officially canceled Fairgame$. The project has been in development by Haven Studios, its Montreal subsidiary, since at least 2023. For those who have forgotten about it, the planned PC and PS5 game was first revealed back on May 24, 2023, through a one-minute-and-50-second cinematic trailer. It showcased three groups of ragtag thieves competing to steal valuables from a luxurious building, with plenty of flashy, high-tech gadgets thrown into the mix.
“Welcome to Fairgame$ – your chance to rob the rich and rebalance the scales,” read the trailer’s description. The game was pitched as a competitive extraction shooter heist where players would infiltrate ‘exotic locations’ and escape with as much loot as possible.
Unlike Concord, however, which at least got a public farewell. Fairgame$ seems to have been quietly escorted out the back door without so much as a goodbye. Unlike Concord, which at least received a public farewell, Fairgame$ seems to have been quietly escorted out the back door without so much as a goodbye. Sony didn’t even post an announcement on its social media accounts or on PlayStation Blog.
There’s a silver lining to this story, however — this time around, at the very least, nobody will be losing their jobs over a game cancellation. “The studio will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities,” confirmed a PlayStation spokesperson, like it did with the God of War live-service project.
Fairgame$‘s cancellation seems to be aligning with PlayStation’s recent approach to managing its first-party studios after the whole Concord disaster. As we previously reported, Sony has been pushing a new philosophy of failing ‘early and cheaply,’ giving its studios room to experiment while keeping development costs and risks under control. PlayStation head Hermen Hulst also assured that the quality control asked for by Sony President Hiroki Totoki is already in motion.
“They knew it was going to be a Concord level failure so they shut it down early,” one Reddit user took a jab. Another chimed in, “Wouldn’t this be like the 4th?” Indeed, Fairgame$ is hardly the first multiplayer shooter to draw comparisons to Concord. More recently, Highguard, the team-based shooter heavily promoted during The Game Awards, was quickly dubbed ‘Concord 2.0’ by many. It ultimately shut down less than seven weeks after launch. At least PlayStation and Haven managed to avoid that particular embarrassment.
