The overhaul nobody wanted to hear about
Guerrilla Games is reportedly in the middle of a significant rework of Horizon Hunters Gathering, the co-op spin-off set in the universe of Horizon Zero Dawn. The game, which was announced back in February as a tactical co-op action title with live service ambitions, has apparently not been landing well during private playtesting. The plan now is to strip out the live service elements entirely and rebuild it as a more focused co-op experience with a story mode and a considerably smaller scope.
That's a pretty drastic change for a game that was originally pitched with an episodic narrative component, a wave-based Machine Incursion survival mode, and a roguelite mode called Cauldron Descent. Guerrilla had been running closed playtests since at least late February, and a second round followed in May. The feedback from those sessions appears to have been the catalyst for everything that's happening now.
A December deadline and a shrinking team
The situation is more serious than a simple pivot. Staff at Guerrilla were reportedly told this week that the team has until December to hit a milestone that impresses Sony executives enough to keep the project in active development. That's not a comfortable position for anyone on the project.
Making things more complicated, a large portion of the developers currently assigned to Horizon Hunters Gathering are reportedly being moved to a separate, unspecified project. That leaves a smaller team to execute the rebooted vision, which is already a scaled-down version of the original concept.
PlayStation has declined to comment publicly on any of this.
Sony's live service track record makes this harder to ignore
Here's the thing: this wouldn't sting quite as much if it were an isolated incident. But PlayStation's live service track record over the past few years has been genuinely rough.
Back in 2022, Sony announced plans to launch more than 10 live service games before March 2026. That number was quietly cut in half. Then came Concord, the hero shooter that launched in 2024 and was pulled from sale just two weeks later. Live service spin-offs for The Last of Us, Spider-Man, and God of War were all cancelled at various stages of development. Bend Studio lost its live-service project and underwent mass layoffs. Bluepoint Games had its live service project cancelled and the studio was shut down entirely earlier this year.
The one genuine success story in all of this is Helldivers 2, which proved that PlayStation can absolutely ship a live service game that people want to play. Bungie's Marathon is still in active development. But those are exceptions in a string of expensive misfires.
In June, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino publicly stated that the company still believes in live-service games and plans to continue investing in the space. That commitment is now being tested again with Hunters Gathering.
What this means for the Horizon franchise
For fans of the mainline series, the situation around Hunters Gathering has a second layer of frustration. When the game was announced in February, it emerged that most of Guerrilla's team had been allocated to the multiplayer project rather than a proper single-player sequel. A follow-up to Horizon Forbidden West was already going to be a long wait. Now, with Hunters Gathering in flux and staff being reassigned, that wait gets even murkier.
The next mainline Horizon game is reportedly still years away, with only a small team currently working on it. If Hunters Gathering doesn't survive its December review, those resources presumably need to go somewhere, but there's no guarantee they flow back into the singleplayer sequel.
This is where it gets interesting for the adventure games crowd who fell in love with Aloy's story across the first two games. The Horizon universe has enormous potential for co-op play, and a focused, story-driven co-op experience without the live service baggage could actually be a better product than what was originally announced. Monster Hunter-style co-op hunts in a world full of mechanical dinosaurs is a genuinely appealing concept. The question is whether the rebooted version can come together convincingly in the time available.
The real question is whether the reboot has enough runway
Getting from a troubled live service game to a polished, story-driven co-op experience by December, even just to a milestone level, is an ambitious ask for a reduced team. The rework has reportedly been underway since June, so there are a few months of work already done under the new direction.
If Guerrilla can demonstrate something compelling to Sony executives by the end of the year, the game survives. If not, Hunters Gathering joins the growing list of PlayStation live service casualties. Either way, the original vision for the game is gone, and what replaces it is still very much a work in progress.
Watch this space closely. The December deadline makes the next few months a genuinely significant window for both Guerrilla and the Horizon franchise as a whole.
