Guerrilla Games Overhauls Horizon Hunters Gathering After Disastrous Playtests

Guerrilla Games is overhauling Horizon Hunters Gathering after closed playtests in June sparked a clearly negative reaction from players toward its live-service mechanics, Bloomberg reports. Instead of pushing forward with the games-as-a-service concept, the studio is shifting the project toward a traditional cooperative experience with a far smaller scope than originally planned. The studio needs to show PlayStation leadership concrete, stronger progress by December.

What's actually changing

Horizon Hunters Gathering was announced in February 2026 as a three-player co-op spin-off, with a stylized, more cartoonish look than the mainline series and a strong focus on team dynamics. Players would pick from a roster of pre-defined Hunters, including the Oseram smuggler Ensa and the Carja covert operative Shadow, who fights alongside a Stalker machine, each with unique weapons and abilities. At the time, Guerrilla said "most of the studio" was working on the project.

According to internal sources cited by Bloomberg, Sony reset the game's development after June playtests revealed that the live-service layer, season systems, progression, the trappings typical of games-as-a-service, simply didn't hold up in players' hands. The new plan calls for stripping out the live-service component and turning the game into a cooperative multiplayer title with a story mode, closer to a classic co-op experience than the expansive seasonal service originally announced.

Another example of a wider industry pattern

This reset lands at a moment when the whole industry is still feeling the effects of a string of costly live-service failures in recent years. Building season systems, battle passes, and multi-year progression requires a different kind of design than a classic co-op campaign, and playtesters increasingly push back on those mechanics, especially when they're layered onto a brand previously known for polished, one-and-done story campaigns, like Horizon.

For Guerrilla Games, it's also a question of studio priorities. If "most of the studio" was working on Hunters Gathering, resetting and shrinking the project also means reshuffling resources, some of which could now flow back into other titles in the franchise's portfolio, including the mainline Horizon series, which has had rumors swirling around it for a while already.

What this means for players waiting on this game

For anyone who's been following Hunters Gathering since the February announcement, the reset means, in practice, a longer wait and a different game than the one originally promised: fewer season systems and progression spread across months, more focus on the co-op campaign itself played with three people. That's not necessarily a worse direction, classic co-op campaigns tend to age better than live-service games dependent on a steady drip of new content, but it means a different product than the one announced half a year ago, and likely a delayed release, even though the studio hasn't given any new date yet.

The December test

The requirement to show PlayStation leadership concrete progress by December is a hard, time-boxed test for the new version of the project, not a soft directional statement. For a studio that has already rebuilt the game's concept from the ground up once, it's a signal that the publisher's patience isn't unlimited, even though Horizon is one of Sony's flagship brands. If the December milestone doesn't convince leadership, the game could face an even bigger question about whether continuing the project in its current form still makes sense.