Has Sony milked the Horizon series dry?

The Killzone games were probably created as a kind of response to Microsoft's then extremely successful Halo titles. Killzone 2 in particular was highly acclaimed and cemented Guerrilla Games as the wizards of graphics. But the games never sold very well, and after Killzone: Shadow Fall 11 years ago it was cancelled.

It was often a Sony practice, up to and including the PlayStation 4, for a developer to make a series of games that were then more or less abandoned when the generation ended. As a result, Sony has a lot of game series where most of the titles are available for a single console (possibly with the occasional exception for other PlayStation formats, or some updated version with better graphics.) Killzone can't really be considered such a game, but it still delivered five games in just nine years, only to be retired.

Since then, Guerrilla has become synonymous with the Horizon series, the first instalment of which (Horizon: Zero Dawn) stands as one of the best designed games I know and featured a main character that I think brought a lot of fresh elements to the gaming world. It certainly wasn't the best game in the world, but I'd probably give it a strong eight, and combined with the insanely gorgeous world and the even cooler enemies, it was a smash hit.

In the industry, this almost automatically means sequels, and five years later came Horizon: Forbidden West. However, it arrived in the midst of an era where Sony decided that live service was the future, with a clear focus on better exploiting its biggest brands. Consequently, in the same year, 2022, it was announced that Horizon would become a TV series. In addition, the VR game Horizon: Call of the Mountain was announced.

At the same time, rumours began to circulate that Horizon: Zero Dawn would be the next game to get the remaster treatment from Sony, and looking at the comments in our news about this, they were all negative. The consensus was that the game was too new for a remaster and so good-looking that it didn't need one. Today, we know that the data was correct, and Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered was announced this year and has now been released, as well as earlier this year, an updated version of Horizon: Forbidden West was also released for PC. To top this off, Lego Horizon Adventures was also announced this year and was also released recently. In addition, we know that there is a live service version of Horizon on the way, which is rumoured to launch next year, and that a new adventure with Aloy is also being worked on.

And over the past few months, we've noticed a clear shift in how you (and others on gaming forums and social media) talk about Horizon. After being an acclaimed series with its unique world and two great main games, the tone has hardened. Horizon: Call of the Mountain was not a huge success and received lower ratings than previous instalments, plus the remaster that was recently launched was perceived as unnecessary and many felt that Sony acted both unfairly and greedily in how they tried to make their users pay dearly for it by stopping sales of the cheaper original.

Then there's Lego Horizon Adventures, which has downright disastrous Steam numbers and pretty mediocre ratings. The fans just seem to have absolutely no interest in it, and I wonder if Sony hasn't managed to show how to effectively puncture a brand's success through overexploitation. This is nothing unique to Sony, but something we've seen many times before, and the fans can only take so much, as the projects have to measure up.

Of course, I have no idea how good the upcoming live service game will be, but the risk is that it will be a rather costly adventure for Sony, because it is simply not something the fans have asked for. A new Concord seems out of the question, but live service is a game style that requires a lot of players who continuously play and buy things, which is the direct opposite of what the Horizon series has stood for. In short, there seems to be a risk that people will simply pass on it, which shows the risk of working in the gaming world right now.

Just look at Ubisoft, which has basically become an Assassin's Creed factory, and has been suffering from a sharply declining market capitalisation for some time. Now there is often talk of some kind of takeover and should the Assassin's Creed series start to decline, I dare say the whole company is in trouble. They have simply put all their eggs in one basket.

I have previously written about how the gaming world would need to launch new major brands again, but unfortunately there is a lot to suggest that the trend is going in the other direction where there is less and less of this. Instead of new series, there will be spinoffs on well-known brands, and the result is that players risk getting tired of a previously loved series, without there being anything ready to replace what has been worn out.

10 or 15 years ago, there were frequent complaints about milking series in Gamereactor's comments section, in an era when there was far less milking than today, where so many games are part of franchises and are continually released in one updated edition after another (if not remasters, then PC versions, or on a new console hardware). If it turns out with the live service game next year that fans are exhausted with Horizon, Sony has no one to blame but itself, and I hope the rest of the gaming world is keeping a close eye on this, because the metaphorical dairy cows will have to be replaced eventually, and when that time comes it'll be immensely important that there is actually something to replace them with.