PlayStation Reboots ‘Horizon Hunters Gathering’ as Live-Service Strategy Struggles

Sony Group Corp.’s PlayStation division is overhauling Horizon Hunters Gathering, the online action game it announced earlier this year, following negative player feedback, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

Guerrilla Games, the Amsterdam-based PlayStation subsidiary behind the Horizon franchise, has been working to reboot the game since June, said the people, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the project’s future. Following poor feedback in private testing earlier this year, the plan now is to strip out the live-service component and turn it into more of a traditional cooperative multiplayer game with a story mode and a far smaller scope.

The game is not yet canceled, but the studio told staff in a meeting on Wednesday that they will have through December to impress executives with their next milestone, the people said. Many of the developers on Horizon Hunters Gathering will be reassigned to a different project that will also be evaluated at the end of the year.

A representative for PlayStation declined to comment.

For the last few years, PlayStation has poured resources into so-called live-service games, online titles that are continually updated and expanded with new content and can be monetized long after they are released. These games can be highly lucrative but are risky to make and often struggle to resonate with players in an oversaturated market. The initiative at PlayStation has mostly led to canceled projects and shuttered studios, forcing the Japanese gaming giant to pull back from plans to release more than a dozen live-service games this decade.

The Horizon Hunters Gathering pivot is the latest example of PlayStation’s failure to crack the live-service market with its biggest franchises. Sony expanded its gaming empire during the 2010s by focusing on narrative-driven, single-player games that drew players to the PlayStation 4 and helped the console sell more than 117 million units. But with the PlayStation 5 this decade, the company has tried to convert many of those franchises to multiplayer and found very little success.

PlayStation has canceled live-service projects in franchises including God of War, Spider-Man and The Last of Us. The failed efforts have burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development time, according to people familiar with the matter. In 2022, the company spent $3.6 billion to acquire Destiny developer Bungie in an effort to help improve its live-service portfolio. But that acquisition has also struggled. This year, Bungie released the new game Marathon to underwhelming sales, put an end to Destiny 2 content and laid off hundreds of staff.

Guerrilla found significant critical and commercial success in 2017 with Horizon Zero Dawn, a single-player action game set in a post-apocalyptic North America. A sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, came out in 2022 and ended with a cliffhanger that left fans eager for the next game.

But the majority of Guerrilla staff then moved to Horizon Hunters Gathering, a drastic departure from their previous titles both in gameplay and art style. A tiny team has been plotting out the next single-player Horizon game but it remains years away from completion, according to the people familiar with the studio’s plans.