2026 has been a terrible year for Bungie. With Marathon failing to garner a major audience base, and Destiny 2 being all-but-shut-down, the future of this once iconic studio remains in flux. Adding to the confusion, Marathon’s Game Director Joseph Ziegler has now announced that he is departing the studio.

Taking to Twitter to make the announcement, Joseph Ziegler confirmed that he will be parting ways with Bungie, writing: “Friday 7/17, will be my last day at Bungie and I'll be passing the torch of Game Director to the very capable and amazing hands of Del Chafe III, who will guide the game forward alongside the Creative Director Julia Nardin. Both of them have been operating in a strong leadership capacity for the team and are ready to guide Marathon into the next chapter with an even better and brighter future.”

Unlike the recent retirement of industry veteran Glen Schofield, Ziegler appears to be staying in the games industry for now, adding: “As for me, I'll be heading to something new, somewhere else, and will update you on where and what soon. I just want to say a deeply heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting me and Marathon in our windy mission to bring a dark and terrifying space survival frontier to your screen.”

The full post can be found HERE, and includes plenty of pleasantries towards Ziegler’s fellow Bungie developers.

For the uninitiated, Joseph Ziegler was brought in to help direct Marathon back in 2022, following the departure of Christopher Barrett. Formerly the director for Riot Games’ Valorant, Ziegler helped to push Marathon past the finish line – for better or for worse.

While the state of Marathon right now is far from perfect, the team do have quite a bit planned, most recently confirming that they will be bringing in some form of permanent PvE mode in the future.

Either way, the departure of Ziegler is a big deal, and marks another pivotal moment for this struggling live-service title. Hopefully the new management can help turn things around.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of this latest departure? Is this good or bad news for Marathon in the long-term? Let us know down below.

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The games industry analysts at NewZoo have revealed the top 20 most-played PC games of 2025, showing that the majority of playtime is concentrated across a select few long-running IPs like Counter Strike, Diablo, WoW, Call of Duty and more. 

We are currently living in an age where every publisher is trying to crack the live-service model, with one big long-running game generating consistent recurring income that vastly outweighs the kind of money made by a typical single-player game. However, as we've seen more recently, these types of games are becoming increasingly risky to release, with games like Babylon's Fall, Rumbleverse, Suicide Squad, Concord and Highguard all shutting down within a year of release.

As the NewZoo data shows, the top 20 most-played PC games is heavily concentrated on legacy franchises. Unfortunately, their resources website is currently down, so I can't link directly to the study, but Insider Gaming managed to grab it beforehand. Below is the full top 20, along with the percentage of overall playtime each game has earned:

1. Roblox – 9.7%
2. Counter-Strike 2 – 7%
3. League of Legends – 6.9%
4. Minecraft – 6.3%
5. Fortnite – 4.3%
6. Dota 2 – 3.6%
7. Valorant – 3.2%
8. World of Warcraft (retail) – 2.4%
9. The Sims 4 – 2.3%
10. Call of Duty – 1.8%
11. Escape from Tarkov – 1.7%
12. Overwatch 2 – 1.5%
13. Marvel Rivals – 1.2%
14. PUBG Battlegrounds – 1.1%
15. World of Warcraft Classic – 1%
16. Grand Theft Auto V – 1%
17. Diablo 4 – 1%
18. Wuthering Waves – 0.9%
19. Genshin Impact – 0.9%
20. Apex Legends – 0.9%

There are just a few genuinely ‘new IP' on the list, Games like PUBG and Apex Legends may not count, as they were preceded by a highly popular mod beforehand in the case of PUBG, and Apex Legends was preceded by the fantastic Titanfall games. Even World of Warcraft had a good fan base built up before launching in 2004 thanks to the prior Warcraft RTS games. Dota 2 famously came to be after starting out as a popular Warcraft mod as well.

That leaves us with just a handful of genuinely brand-new IP on the list, including the likes of Fortnite, Valorant, Escape from Tarkov, Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves and Minecraft. These account for less than 30% of the most-played titles and the majority of them had launched well before the current live-service development trend across the games industry.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: If you need your game to be a top 20 title in order to keep supporting it, then you are likely better off just not going down the live service route at all. As we've seen with Highguard, Concord and Babylon's Fall, having a big budget does not guarantee you any level of success in this saturated market.