Sony’s highest-profile first-party live-service game at the moment is Bungie’s Marathon , an extraction shooter struggling to find a playerbase. There are only a few more confirmed PlayStation projects in the works in the genre, but a new report says, once again, another one is in trouble.

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports that Horizon Hunters Gathering, the co-op live game set in the Horizon Zero Dawn universe, is being rebooted after poor playtests. That may actually involve removing the live-service component entirely and making it a more traditional co-op monster-hunting game (ie. mini- Monster Hunter ) that would also feature some sort of story mode.

The report also says that the game has until December to show it is turning things around. But many developers on Horizon Hunters Gathering have already been moved to a different, unnamed project. Meanwhile, the next full Horizon single-player game barely has a team and is years away.

It is entirely possible Horizon Hunters Gathering will never see the light of day at all, another cancelled live-service Sony project, the highest profile of which was a Last of Us multiplayer game. Sony also recently ended service on the still-popular Destiny 2, easily its highest-profile live game with a 12-year history behind the series, upsetting fans and certainly upsetting Bungie developers, which subsequently laid off half its staff. Again, Marathon is performing far below expectations, and its future is uncertain.

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Sony’s foray into live-service has mostly been a disaster. Its singular win has been Helldivers 2, but Arrowhead is not a Sony-owned studio, and the developer has already said its next game will be self-published instead of returning to a Sony partnership. Sony has also been responsible for what is arguably the worst game launch in history, Concord , which closed down after two weeks with a microscopic playercount. The game took years to make and costs hundreds of millions to develop.

Horizon Hunters Gathering and Fairgame$ are the two biggest upcoming live games right now, with Fairgame$ announced with a much-disliked trailer three years ago, and the biggest news since then has been that its studio head, Jade Raymond, departed the company. Allegedly, it is still in development.

Similarly, Horizon Hunters Gathering never looked terribly good, a live game based on a single-player series which no one was asking for, plus a terrible art style that was far removed from the beauty of the mainline games. It is not a huge surprise that that the fate of the game is in question, given both how it was presented and how poorly Sony has handled its live-service push in the past few years.

I’ve reached out to Sony for comment and will update when I hear back.

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