Do you still remember Fairgame$? We would not be surprised if you would admit here that you never heard of it, or completely forgot about it.
Fairgame$ is slated to be the debut title from Montreal based video game company Haven Studios. Haven was founded by Jade Raymond in 2021, and was acquired by Sony shortly thereafter. We covered the Fairgame$ announcement back in the May 2023 PlayStation Showcase. This is a co-op heist game, similar to the Payday franchise, but with an added PvPvE element. Teams of players take on elaborate traps and labyrinths to steal cash from millionaires. While they will fight NPCs protecting those ridiculously large safes, they will also fight other teams for these prizes.
Fairgame$ did not get a good reception. PushSquare called it “generic Ubisoft fodder” and “Sony’s Most Tone Deaf PS5, PC Title to Date.” But perhaps what should be giving fans pause is the parallels that this game has to a more recent PlayStation Studios release.
Concord released less than two weeks ago, and it emerged almost immediately that it was one of the biggest failed launches, not only in PlayStation’s history, but of the whole industry. Just yesterday, Sony revealed that they would be taking the game offline later this week, and refunding everyone who purchased the game.
Concord also had a teaser announcement in the May 2023 Showcase, but received a full reveal as the featured title in the State of Play for May of this year. And when Sony revealed that the game was actually a 6v6 hero shooter that the community almost immediately turned on the title.
Haven Studios has actually been doing support work for Concord with Firewalk, so the common bad reception of the two games could be more than a coincidence. Some gamers are now predicting that Fairgame$ will also be ‘dead on arrival,’ in the same way that Concord was. We certainly don’t know enough about the game to be able to declare this with certainty. But one of the odd commonalities Fairgame$ and Concord has is that Haven and Sony haven’t shown us much of this game either.
In the latest episode of GamesIndustry’s MicroCast, Christopher Dring and James Batchelor talked about Concord’s poor reception. We would like to point out here that this was clearly recorded a few days before Sony announced Concord’s shutdown.
In the middle of this conversation, Dring brought up the topic of Fairgame$ himself. In his words (edited for clarity),
“I’ve heard good things about Jade Raymond’s game, Fairgame$. There’s a few people I know are a bit skeptical about the trailer, but I’ve heard internal chatter’s very positive about it.”
That certainly sounds like it should be reassuring, but if you don’t feel that way, there’s a reason why. If we keep talking about the parallels between Fairgame$ and Concord, it’s clear that someone allowed development to continue at Concord without giving the critique that it needed to correct course before everything that we saw play out for the game in the last five months. Can Sony really be certain about their own judgement that Fairgame$ will be a fairly successful release?
Dring and Batchelor believe that Sony must have known at some point that Concord was not going to be successful, and deliberately sent it out to die. But unless I misinterpret their statements, they are sharing this without insider knowledge, and are just expressing their opinion.
If Dring and Batchelor are wrong about this, and there are people making decisions on Sony’s live service initiatives who really are this out of touch, than Sony and Haven are not making the necessary changes to make Fairgame$ a success. For the sake of Fairgame$ and Haven Studios, we hope that that isn’t the case.
