If you have been following Sony‘s recent problems with games-as-a-service titles then you will not be shocked to hear that online shooter Fairgames has been cancelled.
A recent playtest, under the name Project Espresso, did not encourage Sony to continue the project.
“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,” reads an internal email sent by Sony. “Combined with challenging market conditions in the [player-versus-player] shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game.”
A Sony representative has confirmed that, just for once, there will be no redundancies at developer Haven Studios due to the cancellation.
Announced in May 2023, Fairgames, was meant to be a AAA multiplayer heist shooter. Check out the trailer.
Haven was set up by Jade Raymond, one of the best-known known individuals in the games industry. Having been a producer and then executive producer through the early years of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, she went on to work on the first Watch Dogs before moving on from Ubisoft. In 2015 she founded Motive Studios at EA, intent on making Star Wars games in partnership with Visceral Games and Amy Hennig. We all know how that turned out, but Motive did craft the single player campaign for Star Wars Battlefront II during her tenure and has become a core part of EA’s line up of studios, having launched a Dead Space remake with an upcoming Iron Man game in the works.
However, last year it was reported that Jade had left Haven and had move on to other projects.
Fairgames joins a graveyard of PlayStation projects either shut down or cancelled by Sony after the platform holder seemingly went all-in on live service games. Despite having a breakout hit in the form of Helldivers 2, there have been some monumental misfires, most notably Firewalk’s big budget hero shooter, Concord, which went offline just weeks after launch.
Source: Bloomberg
