Rumor: Horizon Call Of The Mountain Developer Firesprite Is Now Making An “Ambitious AAA” With A Focus On Immersion

Firesprite seems to be working on a large scale project for Sony.

As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by user fearmept, Sony has opened up a job opening in Firesprite in Liverpool for a Lead Cinematic Producer. The job opening includes this key description of the game:

This is an ambitious, AAA project with a heavy focus on atmosphere, storytelling, player agency and immersion into ground-breaking territory on next-generation hardware technologies.

Firesprite was founded in 2012 by developers from the defunct Studio Liverpool, also owned by Sony. It was originally an independent studio, but had almost exclusively worked with PlayStation for exclusive games before they were formally acquired in 2021. Firesprite is best known for making PSVR 2 title Horizon: Call of The Mountain, but they also made the predecessor to Astro Bot, the original 2013 PlayStation 4 demo title The Playroom.

A year after the release of Horizon: Call of The Mountain, Eurogamer published a whistleblower report alleging that Sony’s mismanagement of the studio allowed a toxic work culture to form from within. Eurogamer’s report particularly pointed at two XDev management heads who were assigned to take over Firesprite. At the time, Sony’s investigations came to the conclusion that the issues with XDev heads stemmed from a misunderstanding.

Eurogamer claimed Sony made other mistakes in managing Firesprite, which seemed to culminate in an extended and particularly strenuous series of layoffs in the studio. Those layoffs included Horizon: Call of The Mountain’s game director, Alex Barnes, but since that time, they started a new wave of hirings.

We last reported on rumors that Firesprite could be working on a new Siren game. While that hasn’t been confirmed yet, we should clarify that Siren really only came up as speculation from the actual information. What news outlet MP1st actually found, after reading resumes of former Firesprite employees, is that the studio was working on a ‘pre-established’ IP and that it could also be coming to PC.

What we will point out here is that Sony didn’t really get Firesprite to work on original IPs from the onset. They were not the original creators of either the Horizon or Sackboy franchises, and were just tasked with making spinoff games. So they could really be working on any Sony IP, including these two, God of War, Syphon Filter, Jak & Daxter, Shadow of the Colossus, Gravity Rush, etc. And Sony could also be having them work on a timed exclusive PlayStation game, like the Silent Hill 2 remake made by Bloober Team. We don’t have a real frame of reference for what Firesprite could be working on now, so we really won’t know until Sony makes the official announcement.