Sony has ordered a development restart for Horizon Hunters Gathering, an upcoming multiplayer spin-off from Guerrilla’s flagship franchise, following negative feedback during closed playtests held earlier this year. According to reporting by Bloomberg, the game is being stripped of its live-service architecture and downsized into a traditional cooperative multiplayer experience featuring a story mode.
The Architecture Shift: Scraping the Live-Service Blueprint
When PlayStation first unveiled the project in February 2026, the title was positioned as a cartoon-styled tactical co-op game. Directed by Arjan Bak, early plans detailed a vibrant social hub called Hunters Gathering, roguelite progression systems, and modes like “Machine Incursion” and “Cauldron Descent.” Players were meant to customize their Hunter, visit vendors, and run repeatable machine hunts.
Following closed evaluations on PlayStation 5 and PC, internal sentiment forced PlayStation executives to intervene. Guerrilla has reportedly been working on the pivot since June, attempting to salvage work by cutting out the elements of a game as a service. The new mandate shrinks the scope, reshaping the project into a streamlined co-op title with a much smaller scope.
Bloomberg notes that management informed staff this week that Guerrilla has until December to hit a critical development milestone and convince PlayStation leadership that the overhauled game is viable. While the project has dodged outright cancellation—a fate that claimed Sony’s Concord and Naughty Dog’s unreleased multiplayer project—it remains in a precarious position. Resources are being shifted; some developers have already been pulled off the project to support another Guerrilla initiative slated for a milestone later this year.
Collateral Damage to the Single-Player Pipeline
The diversion of studio resources toward multiplayer experiments has affected the core franchise. Guerrilla’s next single-player entry—informally referred to as Horizon 3—is currently being developed by a “very small team.” Because of this, there are still years before its launch.
Sony’s broader ambitions in the live-service sector have contracted. Back in February 2022, leadership laid out a roadmap to launch more than 10 live-service titles by March 2026. In 2023, Sony President Hiroki Totoki dialed back expectations, scaling the target down to six games before the end of fiscal 2025.
Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 stands as an outlier, shifting 12 million copies in 12 weeks to become PlayStation Studios’ fastest-selling game ever. Yet that triumph was contrasted by the failure of Concord, which was pulled offline weeks after launch and subsequently cancelled alongside its developer studio. Naughty Dog’s multiplayer The Last of Us spin-off suffered a similar fate, cancelled after reaching nearly 80 percent completion.
Reflecting on the industry-wide overcorrection, Vinit Agarwal, director of the cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer, pointed to the pandemic-era influx of capital. Speaking about the sudden market shifts in 2022 and 2023, Agarwal noted that companies invested heavily into online infrastructure while locked indoors, only to watch consumer engagement and spending contract as offices reopened and household budgets tightened.
Mobile Expansion and Unanswered Questions
Even as the PlayStation 5 and PC spin-off undergoes surgery, the Horizon intellectual property is expanding elsewhere. NCSoft is actively developing Horizon Steel Frontiers, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game built primarily for mobile devices with support for PC, working in close collaboration with Guerrilla.
For Horizon Hunters Gathering, however, the immediate future hinges on whether the reduced, traditional co-op build can pass muster with PlayStation executives this coming December.
