Fairgames
Sony’s fraught relationship with live service games now has shrunk quite a bit with cancelations or in one instance, taking an entire game offline (you know the one, do I even need to say it?). Now, we are circling back to one announced almost two years ago now with literally nothing spoken about it since, Fairgame$.
The Fairgame$ trailer first debuted in May of 2023 with a cinematic trailer that seemed to blend a hero shooter with a heist game like PAYDAY. That spot got a Concord-level like to dislike ratio, as it stands, 4.2K to 54K, just horrific.
Now, we have word about the game, not from Sony, or developer Haven Studios led by Jade Raymond, but from journalist and insider Jeff Grubb, who says the game has “slipped” to 2026 as Sony continues to build out its live service future.
Of note, it was never even officially announced that Fairgame$ would launch in 2025, and if it’s out in 2026, even early that year, that would be around three years since its debut and again, we’ve gotten nothing official from it since then. Many have taken bets (myself included) that if Sony was to announce yet another live game was going to be cancelled, it was this one. Maybe it still should be.
All the ingredients are here for another epic disaster:
- A clear distaste for what has already been shown, judging by that trailer. Another game nobody asked for.
- Diving into a genre that is both oversaturated in one way (a hero shooter, if that’s what it is) and relatively dead in another (a heist game). Combining those seems like a poor idea from the jump.
- A stupid name. You may think I’m kidding, but I’m serious. Not that it was the only problem, to be sure, but I keep thinking about “XDefiant,” a the game will be shut down later this year. “Fairgame$” is just deeply bad.
- Jade Raymond. She has a storied history in gaming through mainly the Assassin’s Creed series, but as of late, her moves have been not great, running Google Studios which would make exclusive content for Google’s Stadia service which ended up being a total disaster with few original games ever released and Stadia failing so hard it had to issue refunds for all hardware and software. Now, her new studio has put out one very poorly received trailer for a single game which has gone totally silent for two years.
Worst case scenario, Fairgame$ is straight up cancelled. Best case, it launches and is badly received. Maybe I’m not giving it a chance, but at this point I think we all can see a disaster coming from a long way off, while we can also spot future hits the same way (Marvel Rivals, for one). It is hard to see this story ending positively at all.
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