Sony and Guerrilla Games are reportedly in the process of rebooting the Horizon multiplayer spin-off, Horizon Hunters Gathering, following poor feedback from playtesters.
That’s according to a report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, whose sources say that Guerrilla began rebooting the game back in June, after receiving negative feedback from closed playtests earlier in the year.
The Amsterdam-based studio is now looking to strip out the live-service components and turn it into a “traditional cooperative multiplayer game with a story mode and a far smaller scope.”
Schreier’s report has also revealed that, while the game has not yet been cancelled, the studio will have until December to impress executives.
It’s reported that “many” of the game’s developers are being reassigned to a different project, which will also be evaluated at the end of the year.
In a separate post on Bluesky, Schreier says that “almost all” of Guerrilla Games has been working on Hunters Gathering for “the last few years”, with the next mainline entry in the Horizon series still “far, far away”.
Announced in February, Horizon Hunters Gathering is a multiplayer co-op spin-off set in the same universe as the series’ mainline games, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West.
Following its reveal, many compared the game to the immensely popular Monster Hunter series, but questioned whether Hunters Gathering would be able to find an audience given how much of a departure the game is from Guerrilla’s most recent releases.
Horizon Hunters Gathering is Sony’s latest attempt to strike gold with its live-service games, having produced incredibly mixed results. Undoubtedly its most notable attempt was with Concord in 2024, which was delisted and shut down just two weeks after launch.