Horizon developer Guerrilla Games’ next project is the live service Horizon Online project, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier has said.
Schreier told Spawn Wave’s Spawncast the promised Horizon 3 "might be a ways off," however. “Guerrilla is an interesting place, because they’re working on this Horizon online game that... I’m not sure how many people want that,” Schreier said, raising questions about Guerrilla’s strategy.
“They’ve got this [Horizon Zero Dawn] remaster coming and the Lego game [Lego Horizon Adventures] coming. What happens if neither of those hit, and it turns out there isn't a ton of interest in Horizon anymore? Are they still gonna be doing the online game? There are a lot of questions around their strategy and around that online game that I certainly have.”
Sony’s live service push has seen a hit in Arrowhead’s PC and PlayStation 5 co-op shooter Helldivers 2, which is the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time, but Firewalk’s hero shooter Concord flopped hard, becoming one of the most disastrous launches in PlayStation history.
And at a time when the live service market is dominated by old games that continue to gobble up players’ attention and, crucially, their spend, newcomers are finding it increasingly difficult to carve out a piece of the action. Before Concord’s release and subsequent shut down, the most high-profile live service casualty was Rocksteady’s much-maligned Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which flopped to the tune of $200 million for publisher Warner Bros.
Sony itself has scaled back its live service ambitions dramatically following big investment. In November last year, Sony president Hiroki Totoki said the company was reviewing the 12 live service PlayStation games it had in the works, and committed to launching only six of them by the end of financial year 2025. The following month, in December 2023, Naughty Dog announced the cancellation of The Last of Us Online, its troubled attempt to create a live service version of its hugely popular franchise.
Then, in February this year, Sony announced a significant round of layoffs affecting around 900 staff at its global PlayStation workforce. The layoffs hit a number of PlayStation studios, including Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, Firesprite, and, most significantly, PlayStation's London studio, which closed down. Alongside the layoffs, a number of in-development games were canceled. In July, Sony-owned Bungie, maker of the Destiny series, suffered devastating cuts, with its PvP-focused extraction shooter Marathon still in the works.
Despite the upheaval at Sony, Guerrilla Games continues to work on Horizon Online. In July, studio director Jan Bart van Beek said the Horizon multiplayer game is "a massive shift for the studio, almost on the same level as doing the first Horizon.”
Van Beek added: "Building this all out to a multiplayer experience is a whole new challenge for the studio."
Guerrilla confirmed the existence of this long-rumored multiplayer game in December 2022, revealing through a job listing that it will feature a brand new cast of characters and a new art style.
A full-blown sequel to Horizon: Forbidden West is also in development at the studio, as "Aloy's next adventure" was mentioned in April. This will join the first two games alongside PlayStation VR2 spin-off Horizon: Call of the Mountain as major video game entries in the franchise.
Don’t hold your breath for Horizon 3, however. "And their plan... I mean, Horizon Online is their next project, not whatever the third single-player game looks like,” Schreier said. “So, that one might be a ways off.”
He continued: "PlayStation's live service initiative was no joke. Everybody was like… it's live service games all around. Horizon is one of the few ones that hasn't been canceled, or hasn't come out and flopped the way Concord did. So, a lot of questions there. But a lot of people are working on that online project.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
