Bungie has already undergone a major shakeup, while the public was unaware of the changes they did internally.
As reported by IGN, Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter Marathon is now headed by Joe Ziegler. Ziegler was previously a game director for Valorant, and joined Bungie in 2022.
But what’s interesting is Ziegler’s revelations when he made this announcement on Twitter. He wrote:
“Hey everyone! Fun update: for the last 9
Months I’ve been working on Marathon as the game director. We’re still baking, but I’m excited to share with you more info on the game as we get closer and closer to bringing it to all of you.”
IGN claims that they had been receiving word that Bungie was planning to move the title’s current game director, Christopher Barrett, out of the role. While they were investigating this, Ziegler just spread the word out.
IGN’s sources also claim that Ziegler has already made changes to Marathon, such as shifting from a customizable playable character to a set cast of heroes. Bungie is currently focusing on this title, presumably to coincide with their choice to wind down Destiny 2 after The Final Shape.
Now, we don’t know the full story here, in spite of IGN attempting to connect the dots. For example, it is possible that Barrett is still also working on the game, if not as co-director, on some other role to keep continuity between his work and Ziegler’s going. As we don’t know where Barrett is now, we do have to take anything that hasn’t been officially confirmed with a grain of salt.
In any case, former Bungie employees fear that this could be an augur of even more layoffs after The Final Shape. Their logic is that Bungie has to see huge profits from that release to justify their investment, and they aren’t confident that that is going to happen.
So, these ex-employees expect Bungie to fire even more people who were working on Destiny 2 as a result of those expected losses. In the bigger picture, they expect Bungie management to leave the company when Marathon gets out the door in 2026. At this point, Sony will have finished making their payouts to the company for their acquisition, and so they’re just going to take the money and run.
It’s all certainly dire speculation for a studio that was once beloved by the Xbox and PlayStation communities. Maybe Ziegler will turn out to prove the doubters wrong, in the same way Naoki Yoshida successfully turned Final Fantasy XIV around.
Still, however much all these rumors and hearsay is true, we know for a fact that Bungie just isn’t the same beloved company anymore.
