Bungie Shakes Up Marathon Leadership As Employees Fear More Layoffs – Report

Bungie’s Marathon has undergone leadership changes and the game’s direction has taken on a new shape in recent months. This report comes just a few months ahead of the launch of the next Destiny 2 expansion, The Final Shape.

According to an IGN report, Bungie has started shifting around the developers leading Marathon as it attempts to get the game finished and out the door. This includes replacing game director Chirstopher Barrett, a long-time Bungie game designer, with Joe Ziegler, who left the Valorant team at Riot Games to join Bungie in 2022. Ziegler has confirmed on Twitter that he has been the game director for Marathon for the past nine months.

On top of these changes for some of the creative leads on Marathon, sources inside the studio said that resources are being focused towards getting Marathon shipped, with the direction of the game changing slightly under Ziegler’s direction. The big change is a switch from using custom characters to named heroes as the playable characters in Marathon. There are also concerns that a large number of senior staff will begin to leave Bungie in the summer of 2026, when the final financial incentives from the Sony acquisition kick in, with the studio attempting to launch Marathon prior to that potential exodus.

There are also fears amongst the staff that there will be more layoffs after the launch of The Final Shape, with one person saying that unless it does exceptionally well, something will need to be done to cut costs. Bungie previously laid off a chunk of its staff back in October. The studio’s other two projects, Matter and project Gummy Bears, are also in a bad place. Matter, a new IP, has been canceled, and project Gummy Bears, a sci-fi MOBA, has been put on pause due to Bungie’s ongoing issues, but has not been canceled.

Bungie has had ongoing problems for several years, dating back to a massive report about a toxic work culture in 2021, prior to it being acquired by Sony. Destiny 2: The Final Shape is set to release on June 4 and Marathon is currently expected to release in 2025 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.