Horizon: Call of the Mountain director made redundant by Firesprite

Horizon: Call of the Mountain game director Alex Barnes has been made redundant by developer Firesprite.

In a post to X, formerly Twitter, Barnes said that he had been made redundant from the studio after almost 7 years.

PlayStation announced plans in February to lay off 900 employees worldwide, or about 8% of its workforce. It’s not clear how many people at Firesprite were affected.

“It has been a tough time over the past few months, thank you to all the folks that have continued to help each other through all of this, you have been incredible,” Barnes’ message reads.

“The people at Firesprite and Guerrilla who pulled together to build Horizon Call of the Mountain are some of the most talented and dedicated developers I’ve had the pleasure to work with,” he added.

“It has been the honour of a lifetime to have been a game director with a team like this.”

Sony’s Firesprite studio was reportedly helming a Twisted Metal reboot that was recently cancelled. Last year, the studio moved into a new studio space in central Liverpool. The company is reportedly working on a horror game. 

While VGC’s review of Horizon Call of the Mountain called it PSVR 2’s killer app, a lack of follow-up software for the headset has been a persistent issue.

In the year since then, the only other game Sony Interactive Entertainment has published for the headset has been Firewall Ultra, an online team-based shooter which was released in August and received a Metacritic score of 61.

A report from Bloomberg in March claimed that PSVR 2 shipments have been steadily decreasing since launch, and that PlayStation has allegedly paused production of the headset entirely.