Guerrilla ran private beta tests on Horizon Hunters Gathering in February and March, then again in May, and by June the feedback was bad enough that Sony told the team to gut the live-service half of the game entirely. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, the redesign has been underway since June: strip out the persistent multiplayer systems, rebuild around a tighter, more traditional co-op mode with an actual storyline, and have something worth showing leadership by December. If it doesn’t land, they already plan to move developers onto other projects by the end of the year.

I keep waiting to be surprised by one of these, and I’m not anymore, not after the year Sony’s had. Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the Demon’s Souls remake, had its own live-service God of War multiplayer game killed sometime in late 2025, and Sony closed the studio outright in March, taking 70 jobs with it. Two months after that, Sony booked a 120.1 billion yen write-down on Bungie in its FY2025 results, something like $765 million. By June 9th, Destiny 2 shipped its actual final content update, and a decade-old live service just ended. Sixteen days later, roughly 400 of Bungie’s remaining 800 staff were cut, gutting what was left of the Destiny 2 team and pushing studio head Justin Truman out the door. Horizon Hunters Gathering is what August looks like on that same calendar.

What makes the timing genuinely strange is that Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO, Hideaki Nishino, spent June telling people he wants to revitalize the live-service strategy through more internal and external collaborations, not walk away from it. Reading that next to what was actually happening to Bungie and to Horizon Hunters Gathering the same month is the kind of gap between what gets said and what gets done that I keep running into all year with this company.

The strategic logic behind all of it hasn’t changed, even if the execution keeps failing. Sony spent 2013 mocking Xbox’s subscription-first playbook and then spent the following decade quietly adopting most of it anyway, chasing the same recurring-revenue math that made Fortnite worth more to Epic than any single boxed release, and made Destiny worth more to Bungie in its good years than Halo ever was during Bungie’s Microsoft era. That math still works when it works. It just keeps not working inside PlayStation Studios specifically, project after project, for reasons that have less to do with any single game and more to do with a company greenlighting ambitions faster than it can staff the conviction to see them through.

The multiplayer version of Horizon actually had real ambition behind it, for what it’s worth: unique character abilities, a roguelike perk system, a social hub for customizing your hunter. It wasn’t a lazy reskin bolted onto an existing world. Almost the entire Guerrilla studio has reportedly been working on it since shortly after Horizon Forbidden West shipped in 2022, which is the detail that actually worries me more than the pivot itself. Schreier’s reporting puts the next real single-player Horizon game far, far away, and four years of a studio’s attention pointed at a project that just got gutted is not a schedule anyone gets back by hitting a December checkpoint.

None of this reads to me like a talent problem. This is the same Guerrilla that shipped PSSR 2.0 a week earlier, a genuinely clever piece of upscaling engineering that cut its own training cost from four GPU-months down to one GPU-week. The technical bench is fine. The business model on top of it keeps failing internal review. Compare that to how Microsoft handled its own overextension this year, cutting roughly 3,200 jobs and divesting four studios outright, a blunter instrument aimed straight at cost. Sony’s version, at least on this project, was to protect the studio and cut the scope instead, which is the more humane call and also the one that leaves the actual question unanswered: does Sony still believe live-service is where PlayStation Studios’ next decade comes from, or is Horizon Hunters Gathering the moment that belief quietly died too, just without a press release to mark it.

I don’t think Horizon Hunters Gathering is dead yet, officially. December is a real deadline with a real chance the smaller version ships and does fine, and Guerrilla has earned enough goodwill that I’d like to see it land. But I’ve now watched Sony run this exact playbook, announce big, test badly, gut the ambitious part, hope the smaller thing works, enough times in a single year that I’ve stopped betting on the outcome. I’m just waiting to see whose turn is next.

Sources