Making Tech Headlines · Page 7
Sony's Ongoing Fairgames Experience Ends Before Its Audience Arrives
· New York time
Sony has canceled Fairgames, a heist game announced in 2023, according to Bloomberg. The project had been part of Sony's broader push into live-service games, a strategy that has also seen other planned titles canceled. A live-service game is designed around continuing engagement rather than a single release followed by a clean ending. For a publisher, the attraction is a potentially long relationship with players. For players, it is another title asking for a place in a schedule that may already include several games and everything else they do. Fairgames shows the limits of treating that model as a guarantee. A company can commit resources to a planned service and still decide not to bring a particular game to market. Sony's wider plans have included multiple projects, but each one depends on the publisher's assessment of the individual game as well as the general appeal of recurring engagement. The cancellation means Fairgames will not get a chance to build the long-running audience envisioned for it. The business language favors continuity, communities and sustained attention. The canceled project has achieved a much shorter kind of lifecycle: an announcement, a place in a larger strategy and an ending before players could decide whether to make it a habit.
Read this story in the full newspaper →Satire. Not factual reporting. Read the original reporting from the linked publishers.