Horizon Zero Dawn's multiplayer spinoff has big dreams, as Guerrilla confirms it's hoping to attract more than 1 million users

As whispers about the multiplayer Horizon game continue, it appears that developer Guerrilla Games could be expecting to deal with a lot of concurrent players, as a new job listing suggests it's looking to hire someone with experience handling at least one million global users.

Spotted by Game Rant, the job listing itself is for a senior platform engineer on Guerrilla's game engine, Decima. However, the page specifically mentions the "Online Infrastructure team" which "owns our Online Multiplayer Game infrastructure." Its "goal" is "to develop systems that enable game developers to reliably build and operate games on a global scale." It adds: "We are deeply invested in the implementation of industry best-practices in the areas of platform engineering and infrastructure management."

The person Guerrilla is looking to hire has a varied list of responsibilities – notably, they'll "own our platform services, improving service levels, incident response, on-call and other operational areas," and "collaborate with software engineers to enhance system performance and reliability." This might tie into the candidate criteria, with Guerrilla noting that it'd "like to hear" from candidates who have "proven experience on building and operating multi service, 1M+ user globally distributed systems across multiple public cloud providers." 

There's no mention of any specific game in the listing, so Guerrilla may be looking to strengthen its online multiplayer capabilities across the board, but by extension this would include the Horizon multiplayer game, too.

Like Game Rant points out, it might not be that Guerrilla is necessarily expecting to produce a game with a concurrent player count to rival Palworld's impressive launch, but perhaps just make sure that it's got plenty of room for error to account for surges of players. After all, there's little more frustrating than wanting to jump into a live-service game when it launches and being faced with issue after issue as the servers crumble under the pressure of trying to handle so many people. 

In 2022, Guerrilla Games was looking for staff to work on an "online Project set in Horizon's universe," but a more recent job listing even suggested that Guerrilla could be releasing a new game as soon as this year – could that be related at all?

I felt like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered didn't need to exist – but its $10 price tag is incredible value for an upgrade that's far more than a fresh coat of paint.