Gaming

### Another One Bites the Dust Forty-five days. That's all Wildlight Entertainment managed to keep the lights on for Highguard, their free-to-play "raid shooter" that launched January 26, 2026, and will go dark forever on March 12.

Bungie's extraction shooter *Marathon* is currently in players' hands — at least for a long weekend — and the results are about what you'd expect from a genre that has never quite figured out how to be fun for everyone.

Riot Games has never been a company content to sit still. For better or worse — and I'd argue frequently the latter — they've spent the past seventeen years turning League of Legends from a game into an entire cultural apparatus.

Most games don't survive a decade. Rust not only survived — it's thriving. Facepunch Studios' brutal, unforgiving survival game has defied every expectation of a typical game lifecycle, and 2026 is shaping up to be the most ambitious chapter yet in its remarkable story.

After what Grinding Gear Games (GGG) itself has described as "a messy year," *Path of Exile 2* is entering 2026 with renewed momentum, a growing class roster, and a development philosophy that stands in deliberate contrast to much of the live-service industry.