Horizon Hunters Gathering Drops Live Service in Reboot, December Deadline Set

PlayStation is rebuilding Horizon Hunters Gathering from the ground up, stripping out the live-service structure it announced just six months ago and converting the game into a more traditional cooperative title, according to a Bloomberg report published August 19, 2026. Staff at Amsterdam-based developer Guerrilla Games were told this week they have until December to convince executives the project deserves to stay in active development.

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, citing people familiar with the company’s plans, reports that Guerrilla has been quietly rebooting the game since June after private testing earlier this year produced negative player feedback. The new direction drops the live-service component entirely in favor of a story mode and a far smaller scope. The game has not been cancelled, but many of the staff assigned to it will move to a different project, one that faces its own evaluation at the end of the year.

Neither Sony nor Guerrilla has commented publicly on the report.

What Guerrilla Announced in February

Horizon Hunters Gathering was revealed on the PlayStation Blog on February 5, 2026 as a tactical co-op action game for PS5 and PC, letting up to three players team up as Hunters defending a world under threat from deadly machines. The announcement detailed two modes: Machine Incursion, a wave-based mission built around a boss encounter, and Cauldron Descent, a longer multi-stage trial with rotating rooms. Hunters were to be customized through a rogue-lite perk system, and a social hub called the Gathering would serve as the between-mission space for upgrades and vendors.

Game director Arjan Bak framed the project at announcement as a long-held studio ambition:

> “With the very first ideas that shaped the world of Horizon, we dreamed of players hunting machines together.”

The post also promised a narrative campaign that would be fully canon to the Horizon universe, a first small-scale closed playtest at the end of February through the PlayStation Beta Program, cross-play between PS5 and PC, and “more regular development updates and playtest announcements” in the months that followed. How much of that structure survives the reboot is not addressed in Bloomberg’s reporting.

A Ten-Game Strategy Down to a Shortlist

The reboot lands on the fourth anniversary of PlayStation’s most ambitious service-game commitment. During a February 2, 2022 earnings call, Sony said it planned to ship ten live-service games by 2026, a strategy it underlined weeks later with the $3.6 billion acquisition of Destiny developer Bungie.

The record since has been brutal. Concord launched in 2024 and was pulled from sale two weeks later. Sony cancelled unannounced live-service projects at Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games, and closed Bluepoint entirely earlier this year. The successes are real but narrow: Helldivers 2 sold more than 15 million copies by the end of 2024, and Bungie’s Marathon shipped in March 2026 to a warm reception.

Horizon Hunters Gathering was one of the few remaining first-party titles carrying that strategy forward, which makes stripping out its service layer less a single project’s course correction than a further retreat from the ten-game plan. The platform question matters here too: Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino has said first-party single-player games will be honed as PlayStation experiences while live-service games ship on both PS5 and PC by default, because reaching the largest possible online audience is the point of the format. A Hunters Gathering rebuilt as a traditional co-op game no longer obviously belongs to the second category.

Nishino Committed to Live Service Weeks Before the Reboot Began

The timing is the detail that stands out. Guerrilla’s reboot began in June, per Bloomberg’s sources. In an interview with Famitsu published June 25, 2026 and conducted in mid-May, Nishino said Sony would continue backing live-service games. “With live-service games, it’s important to keep providing something on an ongoing basis,” he said. “The genre itself is relatively new, and I imagine many people are trying out various approaches, so we intend to continue taking on new challenges within that context.”

Nishino framed live-service titles as content that attracts users on a global scale and pointed to Marathon’s March launch as a well-received entry. Whether the Hunters Gathering decision signals a narrower definition of that commitment, one confined to proven formats rather than spin-offs of single-player franchises, is the question Sony has not yet answered publicly.

What Happens Next

The near-term milestones are now internal rather than public. Guerrilla’s deadline to show executives a viable reworked game falls in December 2026, with the separate project absorbing transferred Hunters Gathering staff facing its own year-end review. The February announcement had promised ongoing development updates and further playtests; none has been scheduled publicly since the report. Gaming.net’s Horizon Hunters Gathering: Everything We Know tracker covers the announced game in full and will be updated as Guerrilla confirms what the rebuilt version keeps and what it cuts.