Sony strips the live service out of Horizon Hunters Gathering and sets a December deadline

Horizon Hunters Gathering won't be the live service game Sony pitched earlier this year. A Bloomberg report published on August 19 says Guerrilla Games has been rebuilding the project since June, after closed playtests came back with negative feedback.

The plan is to pull out the live service parts and leave a traditional co-op multiplayer game with a story mode and a much smaller scope. The original reveal described a tactical, cross-platform co-op action game set in the Horizon universe, closer to Dauntless or Monster Hunter than to a campaign.

And there's a clock on it. In a staff meeting on August 19, Guerrilla told the team it has until December to show Sony executives a milestone that convinces them. Some developers are moving to another project at the studio in the meantime, and that one gets evaluated at the end of the year as well. Nothing has been cancelled so far.

Sony hasn't commented publicly, there's no release date, and it's unclear what survives of the announced cross-platform support and monetisation. The same report adds a separate detail: Horizon 3 hasn't entered production and still has only a tiny team on it.