Horizon Hunters Gathering was originally one of Sony's flagship multiplayer live-service pushes, but now even its core game format is being redefined. According to a Bloomberg report, developer Guerrilla Games is scaling back the project, stripping out live-service elements and adding a story mode instead—bringing the overall experience closer to a traditional co-op game.
The pivot stems from a closed beta test held earlier this year. After receiving poor player feedback, Guerrilla didn't cancel the project outright—instead, it gave the dev team a deadline: deliver results on the next milestone by year's end to convince leadership to keep the project alive. The report notes that most staff previously assigned to Horizon Hunters Gathering have already been reassigned to another project, which will itself face evaluation later this year.
The shakeup also reflects the current state of resource allocation within Guerrilla. Most of the studio's development manpower had previously been poured into Horizon Hunters Gathering, leaving only a smaller team working on the next mainline Horizon sequel—the follow-up to Horizon Forbidden West—which reportedly still needs several more years to complete. Meanwhile, Horizon Steel Frontiers, a separate multiplayer MMO aimed at PC and mobile platforms, has been handed off to NCSoft for external development.
Horizon Hunters Gathering's predicament is just the latest setback in Sony's rocky live-service strategy in recent years. Sony had once planned to launch 10 live-service games by March of this year, but has since cancelled a string of projects—reportedly including titles set in the God of War and Spider-Man universes. Naughty Dog also pulled the plug on its multiplayer The Last of Us project back in 2023, and Concord turned into an instant disaster upon launch. Even the Bungie acquisition hasn't gone smoothly—the studio has wound down active development on Destiny 2, and Marathon has failed to become the critical and commercial hit Sony was hoping for. At the moment, Helldivers 2 remains the only live-service title under Sony's umbrella that has truly found its footing.
