According to Korean publication MTN, the Horizon MMO that was in development at NCSOFT in partnership with PlayStation has been canceled. The game, with its codename Project H, was canceled after NCSOFT fell on hard times in recent months. According to the article, the team is currently being moved to new projects and the MMO has been taken out of their plans.
What was the Horizon MMO?
While this comes just a few days after PlayStation canceled live service games from Bluepoint and Bend, including a God of War multiplayer game, it appears that PlayStation leadership had no authoritative input on the decision for the Horizon MMO to not move forward, though we would speculate they likely had a chance to invest more money into it but didn’t. This game is also not connected to the multiplayer Horizon game that is in development from Guerrilla Games, the original creators of Aloy and her adventures.
We do wonder what a supposed MMO in the Horizon world would look like. We are sure Guerrilla is facing the same challenges of moving the story and focus away from Aloy and making a game that players would want to play in. Sure, the world of Horizon is great with its robotic dinosaurs, but seeing that put into an MMO that would keep people playing every day would be a tough sale. The other multiplayer Horizon game that is still in development is supposedly something close to a Monster Hunter take, which makes more sense to us than an MMO.
By this point, you could definitely say that PlayStation’s live service initiative has been an overall failure. WHile Helldivers 2 has been a big success, at least seven multiplayer games have been canceled before release, and the other one, Concord, was shut down forever after a little over a week. Hopefully, the new Horizon game that won’t feature Aloy can turn things around.