It seems that Sony does not want to stop its live service projects.
This week it was not only Electronic Arts that announced layoffs, but also Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStation Studios are affected internationally, and among them is the Dutch company Guerrilla Games. A Dutch site, AD, has reported that about 10% of the team has been laid off, and as it is the largest game development studio in the Netherlands with 400 employees, about 40 people have lost their jobs.
Guerrilla announced Horizon Online for the end of 2022. Despite the layoffs affecting the team, the project has not been canceled, according to Jason Schreier, writing for Bloomberg. The studio had previously said that it would have a new crew for the game, and that it would not use realistic visuals, but would have a different style. We could see this in early 2023 thanks to a leak. In July, Guerrilla Games studio director Jan-Bart Van Beek said that sixteen projects are planned for the franchise, and admitted that Horizon Online is a big change for the studio, which is also involved in a TV series for Netflix…
Guerrilla Games released Horizon Forbidden West for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 about two years ago, and as of April last year, 8.4 million copies had been sold. According to leaked documents, development costs were incredibly high, with a budget of around $212 million. Sony will recoup some of that with the PC port, which will be released on March 21 and will support upscaling technologies (Nvidia DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3, Intel XeSS) as well as DLAA and Microsoft DirectStorage. Hiroki Totoki , head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, has talked about a more aggressive, faster multiplatform release, so the company’s PC ports may get to us sooner than consoles, allowing the PlayStation division to make more profit…
The status of Horizon Online, on the other hand, is currently just a rumor.
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— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) February 27, 2024
