And then, they will blame the studio when the game fails :/. There is no point to force a studio specialized in single-player games to develop a multiplayer one. And using an existing IP for that is not very effective imo (it reminds me a lot when, during PS360 era, all single player games had an uninteresting multiplayer mode solely to justify the online membership, like Fable 2 or Mass Effect 3). It’s exactly like the last Crash game no one cared about.
It feels like they are buying lottery tickets, hoping a winning ticket will cover all their expenses.
If memory serves, they prototyped the first Horizon as a multiplayer game, which makes sense given the Monster Hunter inspiration; and the Killzone games had multiplayer. Horizon would make a great multiplayer game, but I want to play mulitplayer Horizon, not live service Horizon.