Bloomberg reports Guerrilla has been rebuilding the game since June, stripping out live service for a smaller co-op game with a story mode. The studio has until December to show executives it’s working.
Guerrilla Games is rebooting Horizon Hunters Gathering after players responded badly to it in closed testing, according to Jason Schreier at Bloomberg.
The plan is to remove the live-service component and turn it into a more traditional cooperative multiplayer game with a story mode and a far smaller scope. Work started in June.
The game has not been cancelled. Guerrilla has through December to show executives a milestone that convinces them.
Sony declined to comment.
What Horizon Hunters Gathering was supposed to be
Announced in February 2026 as a tactical co-op action game set in the Horizon world, with Hunters taking on machines together.
The obvious comparison was Monster Hunter. The art direction was the part people fixated on, brighter and more stylized than the mainline games, and Kotaku read it as Sony reaching for something closer to Fortnite in tone.
Guerrilla ran closed playtests through the first half of the year and iterated publicly on community feedback.
What happens to the developers
Many of the people on the project are moving to a different game, which gets its own evaluation before the year ends.
Schreier previously reported that almost all of Guerrilla was working on Hunters Gathering. A small team is plotting out the next single-player Horizon, and that one is years from completion.
Read that together and the shape of the last few years comes into focus. The studio behind one of PlayStation’s biggest single-player franchises put most of its people on a live-service game, and the live-service game is now being rebuilt into something smaller while the mainline sequel sits with a skeleton crew.
Where this sits in Sony’s live-service push
Hunters Gathering joins a list.
Concord launched and was shut down within weeks, taking Firewalk Studios with it. Live-service projects at Bend Studio and at the since-closed Bluepoint Games were cancelled. Sony’s stated ambitions for the category have contracted steadily since.
This one is the survivor so far, and it survived by becoming a different game.
Everything here is reported, not confirmed
None of this comes from Sony directly.
Schreier’s sourcing is people familiar with the company’s plans, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it. Sony declined to comment when asked. Guerrilla has said nothing publicly.
Schreier’s track record on PlayStation internals is strong, which is why every outlet ran it. It is still an unconfirmed report about a game that has no release date.
December is four months out, and the people who will decide this have already seen the version that did not work.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Bloomberg (August 19, 2026), Jason Schreier’s original reporting on the reboot, the December milestone, and the developer reassignments
Kotaku (August 19, 2026), the June playtest timing and the game’s original positioning
Gameranx (August 19, 2026), the note that Sony declined to comment