Guerrilla Reboots Horizon Hunters Gathering Without Live Service After Negative Playtests, Horizon 3 Still Years Away

PlayStation just pulled the plug on another live service gamble. Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier broke the news on August 19 that Guerrilla Games has been quietly rebooting Horizon Hunters Gathering since June, stripping out the live service framework after a string of brutal private playtest results. The Amsterdam-based studio, better known for the mainline Horizon adventures with Aloy, has until December to convince the PlayStation executives upstairs that the game can survive without the always-online grind.

From live service to lean co-op

Horizon Hunters Gathering was first announced back in February as a tactical three-player co-op action game built around hunting the franchise's signature mechanical beasts across Ashwater Valley. The pitch was a Dauntless-style loop with Hunters, perks, and a social hub called the Gathering. Guerrilla pitched it as a love letter to the Killzone multiplayer DNA buried in the studio's history. The first closed playtest ran in late February, a second in May, and a third batch of invites was being prepped when the negative feedback started stacking up.

Bloomberg's sources, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the project, said Guerrilla has been reassigning many of the Hunters Gathering developers to another internal project. Both that mysterious side project and the rebooted Hunters Gathering are being evaluated at the end of the year. If December lands soft, the studio could be facing the same grim conversation Concord did, and Sony does not have the appetite for that conversation twice.

Horizon 3 is still a tiny pre-production team

The other shoe dropped on the same day, when IGN reported that Horizon 3 remains years away from release. A tiny team at Guerrilla is still in the planning phase for the third mainline single-player adventure. Fans have been waiting since Forbidden West shipped and its Burning Shores expansion landed, and the silence from the studio has been deafening. One community voice summed up the mood perfectly: instead of wasting time on a multiplayer game nobody asked for, Guerrilla should have been deep in Horizon 3 development. The math is brutal. Years of engineering talent funneled into a co-op spinoff that is now being retooled, while the mainline sequel sits in pre-production limbo.

Community reaction: Sony's live service strategy is exhausted

The community response has been loud, fast, and overwhelmingly pointed at the publisher, not the developer. Genki's summary tweet of the Bloomberg scoop pulled more than a million likes, hundreds of thousands of reposts, and tens of millions of views. The recurring theme: Jim Ryan's 2023 promise of twelve live service titles by 2026 has produced a graveyard. Concord lasted two weeks before Sony pulled it. Firesprite's Twisted Metal is gone. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us multiplayer was shelved. The Horizon Hunters Gathering reboot joins the long list of course corrections, with the difference that Guerrilla at least gets to try to ship something instead of being shut down outright.

Sony's Hermen Hulst and the current PlayStation Studios leadership have openly admitted the live service bet was overcommitted. Each cancellation costs money and morale, but the bigger bill comes from the games those studios could have shipped instead. Guerrilla could have spent those years pushing Horizon 3 toward a 2027 release. Instead, the studio is now playing catch-up on both fronts at once: salvage the co-op experiment and finally move the mainline franchise forward.

The CriticalPixel take

Strip the live service framing out of Horizon Hunters Gathering and you still have a solid co-op action game concept: three Hunters, big machines, tactical co-op, a hub, and a narrative that ties into the wider Horizon canon. If Guerrilla can ship it as a premium or budget co-op title without the always-online grind, the bones are good. The problem is the opportunity cost, which is Horizon 3 stuck in pre-production with a tiny team. Sony's leadership needs to choose a lane here. Either commit to a live service lineup and fund it properly, or stop forcing every studio to chase the same Fortnite-shaped dragon and let them build the games they are actually best at. Guerrilla is a single-player studio that built one of the most beloved open world franchises of the generation. Burning more years on a co-op detour is the kind of decision that ages badly.

What the December deadline actually means

The Bloomberg report gives Guerrilla a hard checkpoint at the end of the year. If the rebooted build lands well with internal review and a fresh round of playtests, Hunters Gathering survives and gets retooled for a smaller, more focused release window. If it does not, the studio is staring at a full cancelation, with the talent either absorbed into Horizon 3 or quietly reassigned elsewhere inside PlayStation Studios. For a studio that already shipped two of the generation's most acclaimed open world adventures, the prospect of being defined by a failed co-op experiment would be a cruel legacy. December is shaping up to be the most important internal review Guerrilla has had in a decade, and the outcome will tell us whether PlayStation learned anything from the Concord disaster or is simply going to keep repeating the same expensive lesson.