Sony reportedly reverses course on live service co-op Horizon game after ‘negative player feedback’

The developers at Guerilla Games are making a last-minute pivot for their live service co-op game set in the Horizon universe after receiving negative player feedback during recent playtests, Bloomberg reports.

Horizon Hunters Gathering was supposed to be a live service co-op action game where you group up as a team of animated heroes and fight mechanical beasts. Players reacted poorly to it over the three playtests earlier this year—one of which had to compete with Marathon’s server slam weekend that was going on at the same time.

Instead of pulling the plug on it, like Sony has done to several live service games, it gave the studio several months to reboot it into a regular co-op game with a story and a smaller scope. According to Bloomberg’s sources, Sony told the team earlier today that it will need to impress executives with their next milestone in December.

If it fails to wow anyone by then, Horizon Hunters Gathering might join the graveyard of canceled live service Sony games. The company has been on a streak of canning in-development live service projects in the last few years: Popular franchises like God of War, The Last of Us, and Spider-Man had their live service spinoffs killed before they saw the light of day.

Bloomberg says most of the developers on Horizon Hunters Gathering have been moved to a different project and that a small team within Guerilla Games is currently working on the next singleplayer Horizon game.

After the disaster that was Concord, and forcibly putting an end to Destiny 2 as we know it, Sony seems to be getting as far away from live service games as possible. Helldivers 2 and MLB The Show are the only games in that category that seem to be doing well (sorry, Marathon) and that’s probably because one of them is made by a third-party studio and the other is a successful sports series that it can keep releasing year in and year out.

That leaves us with Fairgames, an upcoming live service heist game that we haven’t heard anything about officially since 2023. Insider Gaming reported in April that the developers were struggling to “find the fun” with a pre-alpha version of the game, so who knows what will come of that.