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PlayStation’s live service strategy continues to take on water. Sony had set its sights on launching around a dozen live service games by March 2026, and the results speak for themselves. Concord shut its servers down barely two weeks after launch despite a $400 million budget. Fairgame$ vanished entirely three years after its announcement. Several other projects were quietly cancelled, some in secret, like a God of War multiplayer game, others more openly, like The Last of Us Factions, which had been the only live service title PlayStation fans were actually looking forward to. And yet Sony shows no sign of abandoning the strategy, with two multiplayer games still planned around its flagship Horizon franchise.
As if this landscape didn’t already resemble a vast field of ruins with its last foundations threatening to crumble, PlayStation has apparently made the decision to completely overhaul the development of Horizon Hunters Gathering, following a deeply negative reception during closed beta sessions.
The Horizon co-op game goes back to the drawing board
According to reporting by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Guerrilla has begun rethinking its live service title from the ground up, and it may no longer be a live service game at all. Rather than a game designed to keep players coming back for years through ongoing content drops, the new direction points toward a more traditional cooperative experience with scaled-back ambitions and a more substantial story mode. Horizon Hunters Gathering isn’t cancelled, but the studio now has until December to convince Sony’s executives that it’s worth keeping. A portion of the development team is expected to be reassigned to another project, which will also face its own Sony review by the end of the year.
The pivot follows the particularly damaging feedback that emerged from Horizon Hunters Gathering’s closed beta sessions earlier this year. It’s hard not to see this as yet another chapter in PlayStation’s live service saga, a strategy that was supposed to become the brand’s new commercial backbone. The hope of replicating the success of something like Destiny or Fortnite clearly hasn’t died entirely at Sony, even as live service games built around The Last of Us, God of War, and Spider-Man were all abandoned. Even Bungie, acquired for $3.6 billion to help navigate this very transition, is going through an extremely difficult period following Marathon’s disappointing performance and the halt of Destiny 2 development.
An MMO still in the works
As of the last update, Horizon Hunters Gathering was set to be a cooperative action game set in the Horizon universe, coming to PS5 and PC, allowing up to three players to take on the role of Hunters, each with distinct abilities, weapons, and playstyles, as they track down machines across a series of hunts. The game’s narrative campaign, set after the events of Horizon Forbidden West, is expected to remain part of the package.
At its announcement, the game drew significant criticism for its cartoon art style, which stands in sharp contrast to the photorealism of the mainline entries. The franchise will still get its dedicated multiplayer experience in the form of Horizon Steel Frontiers, an MMORPG developed by NCSOFT, currently planned exclusively for PC.
Source : Bloomberg
