Horizon Multiplayer Game Gets Surprise Playtest The Same Weekend As Marathon Server Slam

The recently announced live-service spin-off game Horizon Hunters Gathering is holding its first closed beta test this weekend. Meanwhile, during that same time period, Bungie’s upcoming Marathon is holding an open beta server slam. This is a bit awkward as the studios and games involved are both owned by Sony.

On February 24, as spotted by deals guru Wario64, some players who signed up to beta test the colorful co-op action game Hunters Gathering have started receiving emails revealing the first closed beta period. The beta will start on February 27 and will be available until March 1 on both PlayStation 5 and Steam. The closed beta will include two game modes and three playable characters.

Meanwhile, the Sony-owned Bungie is getting ready to launch its long-in-development live-service shooter Marathon. And as previously announced, it will hold an open beta server slam across Xbox, PS5, and PC from February 26 until March 2. Now, if you’ll get your calendar out—don’t worry, I’ll wait—and mark both beta dates on it, you’ll notice something odd: They overlap quite a bit.

I guess it was inevitable that, as Sony keeps pushing to launch more live-service games, a few of them would start to step on each other’s toes. And it’s not like they’re directly competing. I imagine the player base for Horizon Hunters Gathering will be fairly different than the group of people interested in playing an extraction shooter like Marathon.

Still, I’m not sure why these betas had to happen at basically the same time. It just feels like more evidence that Sony’s struggling to balance its live-service plans and ambitions. Maybe it won’t matter. But the optics are bad, and after recently shutting down a beloved remaster studio because of a cancelled live-service God of War game, the last thing Sony needs to be doing right now is giving players—who are already blaming Marathon for Bluepoint’s death—even more reason to be concerned about how PlayStation’s multiplayer-only games are being handled.