Horizon's live-service spinoff reportedly rebooted after players said no

Three playtests. According to a Bloomberg report, that's what it took for Sony to see what most of us have been saying for two years: nobody is asking for another live-service spinoff.

The game in question is Horizon Hunters Gathering, Guerrilla's co-op action spinoff in which teams of stylized heroes hunt machines. Bloomberg reports it's been in rework mode since June, after players reacted badly across three playtests earlier this year. The fix isn't a new battle pass structure or a monetization tweak - Sony is reportedly ripping out the live-service layer entirely and rebuilding it as a traditional co-op game with a story mode and a much smaller scope.

Read that again: the rescue plan for a live-service game is to stop being a live-service game.

I'd love to frame this as Sony learning, but the ledger says otherwise. This is the same strategy that gave us Concord's two-week lifespan and the cancellation of The Last of Us Online. The difference this time is that the playtests caught the problem before launch instead of the sales charts catching it after. That's progress, I guess - failing in private is a lot cheaper than failing in public.

And here's the thing: a smaller co-op Horizon with an actual story is a genuinely good idea. Machine hunts are built for co-op - Monster Hunter and Helldivers 2 print money because the gameplay loop itself is the hook, not the seasonal content calendar wrapped around it. Strip away the FOMO scaffolding and there might be a real game underneath.

Whether it survives is a different question. The report says most of the team has already been moved to other projects, a smaller group is carrying the reboot, and there's a milestone in December where it has to impress executives or risk joining Sony's growing pile of cancelled service games. That's not a green light. That's a stay of execution.

Meanwhile, the next singleplayer Horizon is reportedly in development elsewhere in the studio. The part of Guerrilla making the thing people actually buy is doing fine. Funny how that works.

Image: PlayStation Taiwan / CC BY 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horizon_Zero_Dawn_-_Tramplers.jpg