Industry veteran Jade Raymond has departed Haven Studios, the studio she co-founded back in 2021. The studio is ostensibly currently hard at work on live-service heist shooter Fairgame$.
According to a (paywalled) Bloomberg article, Sony didn’t give a reason for Raymond’s departure to Haven staffers, but Bloomberg, citing “people with knowledge of the matter”, says her departure comes after an external test of Fairgame$ about which Haven developers were “concerned”.
Specifically, Haven’s workers are said to have been worried about Fairgame$‘ development progress, as well as its reception during the external test. It sounds like another one of Sony’s live-service gambles might be in trouble.
In a statement given to Bloomberg, Sony describes Raymond as “an incredible partner and visionary force” for Haven. The studio says it wishes Raymond “all the best in her next chapter”, and that it is “committed” to supporting Haven and its new co-leads Marie-Eve Danis and Pierre-Francois Sapinski.
No update is provided on the progress of Fairgame$, which was initially revealed all the way back in 2023. That means it’s been almost two years since Haven or PlayStation provided any kind of information about the project.
According to Bloomberg, Fairgame$ was originally slated to launch in fall 2025, but the publication’s sources say that the game has been delayed to spring next year. No official release window has been revealed by Sony yet.
If Fairgame$ has indeed been delayed, it’ll be another setback for Sony’s live-service slate, which has so far arguably failed to produce a compelling result beyond last year’s Helldivers 2, although it has managed to produce one catastrophic failure in the form of hero shooter Concord.
As well as Fairgame$, Sony’s upcoming live-service slate includes Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon and an as-yet-untitled project from teamLFG, a studio made up of ex-Bungie staffers.
It remains to be seen whether these two projects – or, indeed, Fairgame$ – can provide the live-service hit Sony so badly wants. In the meantime, though, the studio will just have to fall back on its slate of ludicrously successful single-player titles. There are worse fates.
