GoKawiilSony's Horizon multiplayer game seems to be in trouble. Developer Guerrilla Games is said to be reducing the scope of Horizon Hunters Gathering, removing live-service elements and adding a story mode to make it more of a traditional co-op game.
According to Bloomberg, the decision to retool the game follows poor feedback from closed playtests that took place this year. Rather than canceling Horizon Hunters Gathering outright, Guerrilla is reportedly giving developers until the end of the year "to impress executives with their next milestone." It's said that many of those who were working on the game are being reassigned to a different project, which also faces an evaluation later this year.
Most of Guerrilla's developers were reportedly working on Horizon Hunters Gathering while a smaller team began work on the next mainline Horizon game. As such, the sequel to Horizon Forbidden West is still said to be "years away from completion." A separate multiplayer Horizon game for PC and mobile, an MMO called Horizon Steel Frontiers, is being handled externally by NCSoft.
This is just the latest instance of Sony's push into live-service games largely turning out to be disastrous, other than the saving grace of the successful Helldivers 2. The company said in 2022 it planned to release 10 live-service games by March of this year, but it later canceled a string of projects, reportedly including ones based on God of War and Spider-Man. In 2023, Naughty Dog nixed a Last of Us multiplayer game. Concord was a catastrophe. Even Sony's purchase of Bungie hasn't gone smoothly, as the studio has ended active development of Destiny 2 and Marathon hasn't been the slam dunk executives were surely hoping for.
It's frustrating to consider that Sony might have released many more first-party games over the last several years if it hadn't wasted an unfathomable sum of money and developer resources on chasing the riches of live-service games. You never know, though, perhaps Fairgame$ will be the next blockbuster smash Sony has been looking for in that space.