Sony’s upcoming PS5 and PC live-service game Fairgame$ has lost another top developer. Game director Daniel Drapeau has left developer Haven Studios to join WB Games Montreal.
Haven founder Jade Raymond left the company in May. It was reported at the time that Fairgame$ was delayed to 2026 after a playtest proved unfavorable.
Drapeau left Haven weeks ago, and said in a LinkedIn post that they’re joining WB Games Montreal as a creative director for an upcoming project. “Let’s do this!” Drapeau said.
Drapeau is a video game industry veteran, having started back in 2006 in testing and internship positions with VMC and Odd1 before joining Ubisoft in 2007 as a game designer. Drapeau was later promoted to lead game designer on Rainbow Six Siege before leaving to join Eidos-Montreal in 2017 to work on Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Drapeau re-joined Ubisoft in 2019 and worked at the company for two years before moving to Haven in 2021.
There is no word yet on what Drapeau is working on at WB Games Montreal, but the studio was said to have been pitching a new Game of Thrones game earlier this year. The studio assisted Rocksteady with 2024’s underperforming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and also made 2022’s Gotham Knights.
As for Haven and Fairgame$, the game is now reportedly coming in Spring 2026, putting it in the vicinity of GTA 6 in May 2026.
What is Fairgame$ all about?
As you can see in the announcement trailer, Fairgame$ has players going after billionaires who have “too much money and too much power.” In the trailer, we see a squad of players infiltrating some kind of compound, working together to take down security guards with the apparent aim of sticking it to the man.
“Fairgame$ will give you an opportunity to break the rules as a modern-day Robin Hood, a thrill seeker, or just someone who wants to collect cool loot,” creative director Mathieu Leduc said. “Trespass inside forbidden locations around the world, fill your pockets like a kid in a candy store and unravel the nefarious plans of untouchable billionaires.”
Trouble with Sony’s live-service push
Back when Fairgame$ was announced in 2023, Sony was in the midst of a huge push and investment into the live-service market. At one point in time, Sony wanted to release 12 live-service games over the coming years (alongside its commitment to single-player games). However, in May 2023, Sony announced that it was halving its planned live-service game output, with management stressing it wanted to focus on quality over quantity. After this announcement, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us multiplayer game was canceled in December 2023.
At the beginning of 2024, though, Sony found its biggest success to date in the live-service market with Helldivers 2–the game went on to smash sales records and become the No. 3 overall best-selling game of 2024 in the US. It recently came to Xbox, and, along with a new update, has seen a huge surge in popularity.
In August 2024, Sony launched the multiplayer game Concord. It had such a dismal performance out of the gate that Sony quickly took the game offline and refunded all players. Its developer, Firewalk, was later closed. At the end of 2024, Sony confirmed that it canceled multiple projects, including a live-service God of War and another live-service title from Bend.
It was reported in 2023 that PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who left Sony in 2024, had a mandate that Sony’s teams should make more games-as-a-service titles. A number of PlayStation developers were reportedly upset with this, and the blame was said to have fallen not on Ryan but Connie Booth, one of the most important and veteran PlayStation developers, leading to her eventual departure.
Another former PlayStation boss, Shuhei Yoshida, recently said the chance of finding success in the competitive live-service market was “small,” but his replacement, Hermen Hulst, was given the resources to fund both single-player games and live-service titles at the same time. However, had Yoshida stayed in that role, he said he would have “tried to resist” the push into the live-service market. He joked, “That’s one of the reasons they removed me.”
In addition to Fairgame$, Sony is working on multiple other live-service games, including Bungie’s Marathon–which is facing its own set of challenges and has been delayed indefinitely. Another game, codenamed Gummy Bears, which spun out from Bungie at SIE, recently crossed a milestone.
Following the failure of Concord, top boss Hermen Hulst said Sony put new structures in place to help ensure its live-service games come to market in better shape.
For more on Sony’s live-service games, check out the gallery below to get the latest on the status of all the projects in the works.
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