Guerrilla Games Scales Back Horizon Co-op Title, Drops Live-Service Elements

Guerrilla Games is cutting back the scope of Horizon Hunters Gathering, removing live-service features and adding a story mode to reposition the project as a traditional co-op game. The studio has also given developers until the end of the year to impress executives with their next milestone, rather than canceling the title outright. The news was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed in subsequent reporting by Engadget on August 19, 2026 (Engadget).

Live-service games are designed to keep players engaged long-term through regular updates, seasonal content, and often microtransactions — think of titles like Fortnite or Destiny, which evolve over years rather than offering a fixed, one-time experience. Guerrilla's original vision 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 in which 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. Rather than push forward with a formula that wasn't landing with testers, Guerrilla is pulling back to a more conventional co-op structure with a story mode attached.

The restructuring has internal ripple effects. Many developers previously assigned to Horizon Hunters Gathering are being reassigned to a different project within the studio, which itself faces an evaluation later this year. Most of Guerrilla's developers had been working on Hunters Gathering, while a smaller team began work on the next mainline Horizon game. That sequel to Horizon Forbidden West is reportedly still years away from completion.

The Horizon franchise still has a multiplayer footprint, though not entirely in-house. A separate MMO — a massively multiplayer online game — for PC and mobile called Horizon Steel Frontiers is being handled externally by NCSoft.

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 supplement Sony's traditional single-player strength with recurring-revenue titles — games that generate ongoing income through subscriptions, expansions, or in-game purchases. 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 in closed testing and is iterating before a public launch. 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 resource constraints across the studio.

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 loop is mechanically suited to cooperative play, and stripping out live-service obligations may let the development team focus on a tighter, self-contained experience. The challenge for Guerrilla will be proving that pivot to executives before the deadline arrives.