Yesterday, Sony announced a major reduction in its PlayStation Studios’ global workforce, including prized developers like Guerrilla Games.
Dutch website AD later revealed that Guerrilla lost around 10% of its headcount. Considering that the game developer has around 400 employees (by far the largest studio in the Netherlands), it follows that roughly 40 of them were let go.
Guerrilla released Horizon Forbidden West for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 around two years ago. The game was a critical and commercial success. Last we heard, it had surpassed 8.4 million units sold as of April 2023. However, just like Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, it likely suffered because of its high budget. Leaked documents have revealed that Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million.
Sony will likely recoup some money with the PC version, which is slated to launch on March 21 with NVIDIA DLSS 3, DLAA, AMD FSR 3, Intel XeSS, and Microsoft DirectStorage support. However, SIE Chairman Hiroki Totoki recently hinted at a quicker, more aggressive pace of multiplatform release on PC to improve the dwindling profit margins of the PlayStation division.
As for Guerrilla, the good news is that the Horizon Online project announced in late 2022 hasn’t been canceled, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. The developer previously said the co-op game would feature a new cast of characters and stylized visuals instead of the realistic graphics we’re accustomed to with the main series. In early 2023, a leak provided a very early look at the project.
In July, Guerrilla Games Studio Director Jan-Bart van Beek went as far as saying there were sixteen projects planned for the franchise. On that occasion, he admitted that Horizon Online was a significant shift for a studio. The upcoming Netflix TV series is also likely to be keeping at least a few people within the team busy.
If you’ve been waiting for the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West to play the game, you can find my review of the PS5 version here.
