Sony's Studio Behind Horizon Is Reworking Its Multiplayer Game After Players Didn't Like It
Guerrilla Games, the studio behind the Horizon series, is cutting back the size of its upcoming multiplayer game Horizon Hunters Gathering. The studio is removing live-service features and adding a story mode, turning it into a more traditional co-op game. Developers have until the end of the year to show executives that the project is on the right track, or it could face further changes. The news was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by Engadget on August 19, 2026 (Engadget).
A live-service game is one designed to keep players coming back for months or years, with regular updates, new seasons of content, and often optional purchases along the way. Games like Fortnite work this way. Guerrilla's original plan for Hunters Gathering leaned in that direction. The studio announced the project on February 5, 2026, in a PlayStation Blog post describing it as a tactical three-player co-op action game where players hunt deadly machines and adapt their Hunter for intense missions. Game Director Arjan Bak led the announcement. At the time of its reveal, the title supported up to three-player team-ups with a roster of selectable characters.
The decision to retool the game follows poor feedback from closed playtests conducted earlier this year. Playtests are private sessions where a small group of players tries an unfinished game and shares their honest reactions. The feedback was negative enough that Guerrilla decided to change direction rather than keep going as planned.
The restructuring is affecting the studio internally. Many developers who were working on Hunters Gathering are being moved to a different project within the studio, and that project also faces a review later this year. Most of Guerrilla's developers had been working on Hunters Gathering, while a smaller team began work on the next main Horizon game. That sequel to Horizon Forbidden West is reportedly still years away from completion.
The Horizon franchise still has a multiplayer presence, though not entirely in-house. A separate large-scale online game for PC and mobile called Horizon Steel Frontiers is being made externally by NCSoft, a Korean game company.
The broader context here is Sony's live-service strategy, which has hit a sustained rough patch. In 2022, Sony stated it planned to release 10 live-service games by March 2026. The count of delivered titles has fallen well short of that target, and several high-profile projects have been canceled or shut down entirely. In 2023, Naughty Dog cancelled development on a The Last of Us multiplayer game. Sony also pulled the plug on Concord and shut down its developer, Firewalk Studios. Bungie, another Sony subsidiary, ended active development of Destiny 2 on June 9.
What this means for PlayStation's pipeline is a narrower margin for error. The live-service pivot was meant to add ongoing, revenue-generating games alongside Sony's traditional single-player titles. Instead, the company has absorbed multiple cancellations and studio closures, and the remaining projects in that portfolio are undergoing significant retooling.
For Guerrilla specifically, the repositioning of Hunters Gathering from a live-service to a traditional co-op model reflects the playtest feedback loop functioning as designed. The studio caught the problem early and is making changes before the public ever sees the game. The risk is that the end-of-year milestone evaluation leaves the project in a precarious position, and reassigning staff to a separate project facing its own review suggests the studio is stretched thin.
Looking at what this enables rather than what it threatens, a traditional co-op Horizon game with a story mode could still fill a gap in PlayStation's lineup. The franchise's machine-hunting combat is naturally suited to playing with friends, and removing live-service obligations may let the team focus on a tighter, self-contained experience. The challenge for Guerrilla will be proving that approach to executives before the deadline arrives.
