PlayStation has announced that it will be holding a playtest for the Horizon Hunters gathering this weekend. If you're sure you already have something else and aren't able to make it, it might be because Marathon, another PlayStation-published Live Service game, is running its server slam at the same time.
PlayStation is running its Horizon and Marathon Playtests at the same time
Details about Horizon Hunters Gathering's upcoming playtest reveal that it will begin Friday, February 27, 2026, and runs through March 1. The game will only be accessible at certain times (between 7pm and 10pm CET in Europe, and 4pm to 7pm PST in the US), and will run on both PS5 and Steam.
Marathon's server slam, a test to ensure the game will be ready to handle the stress before its full release on March 5, begins a little earlier. on February 26, and ends a day later, on March 2. Marathon will be open 24/7 on all platforms during its testing, and will be the entirety of the hunter gatherer playtest when the server slam continues.
This has people a little confused, to say the least. Hunter Gathering is developed by Guerrilla, and Marathon is developed by Bungie. Both live service games created by studios owned by PlayStation. With that in mind, you'd think there was room for someone at PS Towers to step in and question whether running tests for both games simultaneously was a good idea.
Why does Horizon's playtest need to happen this weekend?
The responses to the news that Hunter's Gathering will run a playtest alongside a marathon server slam have, unsurprisingly, been filled with people asking why PlayStation would do this. Some have pointed out that running any tests on the same weekend that Resident Evil Requiem is released is probably wrong. Sure, PlayStation has nothing to do with that, but it still chose this weekend to exclusively run Tandem Live Service network tests.
This doesn't seem like a big deal to anyone, and there's even an argument that Horizon and Marathon, for the most part, won't draw from the same player base. However, at a time when PlayStation doesn't seem to know what it's doing in many respects, running two Playtests at the same time will only make things worse for its already incredibly troubled Live Service aspirations.
Several of PlayStation's Live Services projects — God of War, The Last of Us, Spider-Man — have been canceled. Marathon and Hunter's Gathering have managed to escape the clan, and you'd expect PlayStation to have strong plans to try and make sure they succeed. This playtest confrontation suggests otherwise, and it comes on the heels of the still shocking Bluepoint closure, a decision that some have blamed, unfairly, on Marathon.
