Guerrilla is reportedly overhauling Horizon Hunters Gathering to make it more of a traditional co-op game

Sony’s live-service push appears to be hitting another snag, as developer Guerrilla Games is reportedly scaling back its upcoming Horizon multiplayer title. According to Bloomberg, the project, called Horizon Hunters Gathering, is being redesigned to remove live-service elements and add a story mode, shifting it toward a more traditional co-op experience. The change follows poor feedback from closed playtests held this year, and Guerrilla has reportedly given its developers until the end of the year to impress executives with the next major milestone.

Rather than canceling Horizon Hunters Gathering outright, Guerrilla is said to be reassigning many of its developers to a different project, which is also scheduled for an internal evaluation later this year. Most of the studio’s workforce had been focused on the multiplayer game, while a smaller team worked on the next mainline Horizon title. As a result, the sequel to Horizon Forbidden West is still described as years away from completion, according to the report.

The multiplayer Horizon game is separate from another project, an MMO called Horizon Steel Frontiers, which is being developed externally by NCSoft for PC and mobile. That title appears to be unaffected by the reported changes to Guerrilla’s in-house multiplayer effort. The overall situation marks another setback for Sony’s broader live-service strategy, which has faced repeated difficulties.

Since 2022, Sony has said it planned to release 10 live-service games by March of this year, but that target has not been met. The company has since canceled a string of projects, including ones reportedly based on God of War and Spider-Man. In 2023, Naughty Dog also shelved a planned Last of Us multiplayer game, and Concord, a major live-service shooter, was a commercial failure. Even Sony’s acquisition of Bungie has not gone smoothly, as the studio has ended active development on Destiny 2, while its other project, Marathon, has not delivered the results executives likely hoped for.

The repeated missteps highlight a broader issue for Sony’s first-party output, as resources poured into live-service experiments have diverted attention from single-player titles. Many of these projects never reached release, and the financial cost of chasing the live-service market has been substantial. The company’s next test in this space may be Fairgame$, a live-service title that remains unproven, though the source article offers no evidence of its potential success.

For US players, the impact is clear: the Horizon franchise’s next major single-player entry will likely arrive much later than originally expected, while the multiplayer spin-off is now uncertain in its final form. Guerrilla’s reported pivot to a more conventional co-op structure, if it succeeds, could still deliver a game, but the timeline remains tight. The reassignment of staff and the end-of-year deadline suggest that Sony is not willing to let another live-service project drag on indefinitely.