PlayStation Cancels Fairgame$, Haven to Become Support Studio - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 1 day ago / 2,291 Views
PlayStation has cancelled first-party developer Haven Studios' online shooter, Fairgame$, three and a half years after the game was first announced.
A PlayStation spokesperson told Bloomberg there will be no job cuts Haven Studios and the developer will instead become a support studio.
"The studio will shift its focus to collaborating with other development teams across PlayStation Studios, while also exploring new creative opportunities," said PlayStation in a statement.
Bloomberg reports Fairgame$ had been reworked several times over the last few years and the plan was to re-reveal it with a new title. A recent playtest had thousands of players and in the end it did not deliver on the expected results made by PlayStation, according to the company in an email sent to employees on Tuesday.
"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," wrote executives Sean Decker and John Doyle. "Combined with challenging market conditions in the PVP shooter genre, we have made the difficult decision to cease development on the game."
PlayStation this generation has attempted to pursue live service games with the majority of them being cancelled and several studios being shut down, including Bluepoint and Dark Outlaw Games.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Another one bites the dust. So many resources wasted on Sony's live service push.
Can't say I am sad about that. Everyone and their mother predicted that Sony would waste a lot of resources to launch one successful live service game. But hey HD2 stuck and is pretty awesome. Although I fear it will be the only one, alongside a new Gran Turismo perhaps.
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Out of the doorway, the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat, yeah
LMAOOOOOOOOO
Another One!!!
At this point Hermen Hulst and Playstation studios leadership should all step down for such disastrous planning and administration!
Every single executive responsible for such huge number of failures and embarrassing fiasco should be fired! Playstation got lucky, because somehow Xbox managed to fail even harder.
It is remarkable the number of bad things that have to happen before a CEO is forced to take responsibility. I agree completely though - think of the Billions (with a B!) of completely wasted money over the past 6 years now in mismanaging developers.
What an absolute trash generation for Sony. Just abysmal.
Also another turd that got a lot of resources put into it while Factions II was canceled.
Factions II got so many resources put into it that supporting it would ahve meant that naughty dog permanently became a live service studio. helldivers II wasn't even expected to be big but when it was arrowhead had to drop everything and focus on supporting it for years. You can't complain about live service projects and also complain that a major single player studio didn't want to be beholden to one forever.
Ah yes yes we have been absolutely swimming in Naughty Dog single player games this gen.
ND didn’t need to support the game forever. Sony could have had any of these live service studios take over.
man I just want japan studio back
These companies just couldn't be happy selling 10m-25m copies of great single player games and getting goty awards instead they wasted billions of dollars so they can build uninspired live service slop so they can just sell low effort skins every update and put their feet up
Because only making one type of game is not a winning strategy. everyone knows this which is why cinematic sony game is meme that everyone mocks. yet they also get mocked for trying to diversify their revenue. it's not like they ever stopeed making third person cinematic action adventures.
Diversify? I don't know at which Sony you looked, but the live service push was the major strategy that took up most of the room in Sony's development. The few single player games like Astrobot are looked at more positively, but Sony's output is dominant by the failed live service strategy. So no, they weren't mocked for diversity, they were mocked for another monoculture that was even worse.
So Sony games are either cinematic walking simulators or live service failures, where is the diversity exactly? I guess there is Astrobot and Yotei...
If only Sony had read the general reactions online years ago.
You mean when everyone was playing and buying stuff in online service games by the billions? And still are.
I can't fathom why they spent 3 years of development budget trying to save it after it's reveal was so disastrous, it had a worse like/dislike ratio than Concord, and Concord flopped so hard they didn't make a dime back from it, they had to refund everyone that did buy it.
Good.
Helldivers 2 single handedly paid for all of Sony's failed live service attempts.
It wouldn't. Unlike the other games, Sony doesn't own Arrowhead, so Arrowhead themselves gets a lot of that money too rather than Sony getting 100% of the revenue from an owned studio that stays on their books.
Sony's invested hundreds of millions, if not billions, into their live service ventures, so something like HD2 alone would not cover their losses.
But Sony does also have GT7 and MLB The Show, although the latter we don't know how much MLB takes from that revenue, but still a successful annual live service.
The fact a company exists with the use of a $ in its name really confuses me here.
Literally sounds like a pay to win company
Fairgame$ is the name of the game that was canceled. Haven Studios is the name of the developer.
So the game sounds like a massive MTs pay to win game.. not sure if this company knew it wouldn't stick
No company knows if their game will be a hit until it's released.
The name alone was a massive red flag, which is why im confused that the company and Sony didn't see this earlier.
Why? It's just a name. Fairgames but the S is a dollar sign so show it's about "games" and money. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a game with a character called Zelda in it and has an Ocarina which moves time.
One of the worst mtx game on the market right now is called "Diablo 4." so it's not like the name matters.
Trying to make two or three live service games at a time is risky and a huge money sink. But that I could have understood. Sony could have done that while making sure to release games they know their customer base wants on the regular. But 12 games? All these studios? All these billions? Bungee? Marathon? Bluepoint? God of War? Horizon Hunters Gathering? Bend? Concord? Factoons 2 (ooppsies, what, live service cost money?)? Deviation? Twisted Metal? London Studio? Spider Man the Great Web? Fairgame$?
The utter incompetence. What a waste of talent and time and money. Heads have to roll.
At least they had the sense to quit now instead of having another embarrassing launch and bleeding even more money. Maybe they have learned just the tiniest bit?
New studio working on a game, bought because of the spending spree and never even got to release their game. Could have been the next big thing, probably not however. Shame for the devs.
I wonder if it'll be Haven that will be assisting Bungie in unvaulting all the Destiny 2 content. Timing lines up and decisions like these aren't made overnight.
This has to be the most expensive support studio purchase ever.
Because the intention isn't for them to only be a support studio . bluepoint worked as support in between demon's souls and their live service pitches.
Yeah but it’s crazy that Sony will have owned Haven for about a decade before they finally release a game. Bluepoint at least specialized in remakes and remasters rather than having to make something original, which naturally lengthens development
