Horizon Zero Dawn Is Quietly Returning to PS Plus After a Two-Year Absence

Sony has never been especially transparent about why games enter or exit the PS Plus catalog, and Horizon Zero Dawn is a textbook example of that frustrating opacity. Pulled from the service roughly two years ago, Guerrilla's open-world debut is now reportedly making its way back — and this time, it's the remastered PS5 version that subscribers are set to receive.

From Catalog Staple to Paid Upgrade — and Back Again

Horizon Zero Dawn had a long run as one of PS Plus's flagship offerings. Sony used it to showcase the value of its subscription tiers, making it available as a free monthly title before it eventually graduated into the broader catalog. Then, without much fanfare, it disappeared. The timing wasn't accidental: Sony tends to pull titles when it wants to reposition them as premium purchases, and with a PS5 remaster in development, keeping the original freely available would have undermined the upgrade's value proposition.

That remaster dropped in late 2024, bringing visual overhauls, DualSense haptic integration, and performance improvements that made revisiting Aloy's debut worth the effort — if you were willing to pay for it. Now that the remaster has had its commercial window, bringing it back to PS Plus is a logical next step in Sony's content lifecycle.

What the Remaster Actually Adds

For anyone who hasn't touched Horizon Zero Dawn since the PS4 era, the remastered version is a meaningful step up rather than a superficial coat of paint. Facial animations were rebuilt from scratch, a persistent complaint about the original that Guerrilla finally addressed. Lighting systems were overhauled, and the game now runs at a locked 60fps in performance mode without the frame-pacing hiccups that occasionally plagued the base PS4 version on PS5 via backward compatibility.

The haptic feedback implementation is also more than cosmetic — each machine type has a distinct vibration signature, and drawing the bow now has a tangible resistance built into the adaptive triggers. It's the kind of detail that makes you realize how much the original release was designed around a controller that didn't exist yet. None of this reinvents the game, but it's enough to make the remaster feel like the definitive way to experience it.

What This Means for PS Plus Subscribers

If the reports hold, this would be a notable win for PlayStation's mid-tier subscribers. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition — including the Frozen Wilds expansion — was already one of the more compelling reasons to maintain a PS Plus subscription during its initial catalog run. Getting the remastered version at no additional cost would be a genuine upgrade over what subscribers had access to before.

It also signals something about how Sony plans to manage its first-party back catalog going forward. The window between a remaster's commercial release and its catalog availability appears to be shrinking, or at least becoming more flexible. That's good news for subscribers who don't want to double-dip on games they already own in older formats — and it adds pressure on Sony to keep refreshing the library with titles that actually matter rather than padding it with mid-tier third-party filler.

The Bigger Picture: Horizon's Place in PlayStation's Identity

It's easy to underestimate how important Horizon Zero Dawn was to PlayStation's credibility as a first-party platform. When it launched in 2017 alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — a comparison the gaming press couldn't resist making — most expected it to get buried. Instead, it sold over 20 million copies and launched a franchise that now includes a direct sequel, a multiplayer spinoff, and enough lore to fill a small library.

Bringing it back to PS Plus isn't just catalog housekeeping. It's a reminder that Sony has a deep enough bench to rotate genuinely great games through its subscription service rather than relying on aging indie titles to fill the gaps. Whether that goodwill translates into better subscriber retention is a different question — but for anyone who missed Aloy's origin story the first time around, this is as good an on-ramp as you're going to get.

No official confirmation or exact date has been announced by Sony as of this writing. We'll update when the rollout is made official.