The Week in Gaming: Modern Warfare 4 Betas, Marathon’s PvE Pivot, Xbox’s Identity Crisis, and a Pirate King
July 22, 2026 — From Call of Duty’s bold Switch 2 debut to Assassin’s Creed’s record-shattering remake, from Bungie’s Marathon gamble to Xbox’s exclusivity limbo, this is everything that matters in gaming right now.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Beta Dates Announced — Switch 2 Joins the Fight
Activision has finally pulled back the curtain on what the next few months look like for Modern Warfare 4, and the headline is simple: the beta is coming, and it’s coming to everything — including the Nintendo Switch 2.
The publisher officially announced the return of Call of Duty: Next, the annual showcase event that has served as the home for multiplayer gameplay debuts. This year’s edition is set for August 21st and will switch to an entirely online format — what Activision is calling “a global event” rather than an in-person gathering. A developer briefing will set the stage before handing off to live gameplay from creators.
But the real news is the beta schedule, which kicks off the moment the Next broadcast concludes:
- Weekend 1 (Closed Beta): August 21st–25th — PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S. Pre-order required.
- Weekend 2 (Open Beta): August 28th–September 1st — All platforms, including Nintendo Switch 2. Open to everyone.
The Switch 2 inclusion is genuinely historic. This is the first time a mainline Modern Warfare title will be playable on a Nintendo handheld at the open beta stage, and Activision has confirmed that Switch 2 pre-orders will go live on August 26th — sandwiched neatly between the two beta weekends.
According to the official Call of Duty blog, the beta will feature 19 weapons playable across maps ranging from small 3v3 arenas to large-scale battles with vehicles. Modes include the returning Search & Destroy alongside a new arrival called Kill Block. The beta also includes a Training Mobility Course, designed to teach players the game’s new movement mechanics — a response to the community debate that erupted after gameplay footage from Fanatics Fest NYC showed a pace of combat that some found alarmingly fast.
Modern Warfare 4 is set for release on October 23rd across PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch 2. The question now isn’t whether it will sell — it always does — but whether the movement speed debate will define the conversation the way it did for Modern Warfare 3.
Marathon’s Vault Breaker: Bungie Bets on PvE While the Ship Leaks
Bungie’s Marathon, the extraction shooter that launched earlier this year to a mixed reception, is getting its most significant update yet. Season 2’s mid-season patch, which dropped today, introduces Vault Breaker — a time-limited PvE roguelite mode that runs from now through August 4th.
Vault Breaker takes place on the Cryo Archive map and supports solo, duos, and trios. It’s accessible to everyone regardless of Runner level, and it functions as a self-contained roguelite experience separate from the game’s core PvP modes. Players raid increasingly tough Vaults while fighting UESC enemies, earning Vault Data currency to upgrade their Sponsored Kit between runs. The push-your-luck mechanic is classic extraction shooter design: the deeper you go, the better the rewards, but dying means losing everything.
Crucially, gear earned in Vault Breaker cannot be used in the normal game. Everything — except event currency and rewards — converts to Vault Data upon extraction. This is Bungie’s way of keeping the mode from becoming a farming shortcut while still making it meaningful. The Vault Data can also be spent in the Vault Breaker Armory to purchase items and gear for use outside the mode, giving PvE-only players a reason to engage.
But the context is impossible to ignore. Marathon launched just four months ago and has been struggling. The game’s director, Joe Ziegler, left Bungie last Friday for “a new adventure.” The studio was recently hit with major layoffs as part of Sony’s broader restructuring — though most redundancies affected the Destiny team, Marathon also lost developers. A full PvE mode is promised for Season 3, but details remain scarce.
Vault Breaker is a smart, low-stakes experiment: a two-week limited mode that tests whether Marathon’s audience wants PvE without committing to a permanent overhaul. If it lands, it could signal a pivot. If it doesn’t, the questions about Marathon’s long-term viability will only get louder.
Xbox’s Exclusivity Strategy: Nobody Knows, Including Xbox
If you’re confused about what games are coming to what platforms under the Xbox banner, you’re not alone — Xbox executives seem equally puzzled.
Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball and chief content officer Matt Booty recently sat down with GamesRadar to try to clarify the company’s exclusivity stance following June’s Xbox Games Showcase and the subsequent 3,200-job layoff wave and studio divestments. The result was, charitably, more questions than answers.
Ball confirmed that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution won’t be the only Xbox console exclusives. “I can assure you, Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are not the only titles we’re planning,” he said. “To grow a platform like ours, you have to have exclusive games and services. These are not going to be the only two titles.”
But the specifics are where things fall apart. The current theory is that Microsoft will keep single-player games Xbox-exclusive while making live-service multiplayer titles multi-platform — a strategy that mirrors Sony’s approach. But Booty said he “wouldn’t overly fixate on single-player” and that this approach “isn’t something that’s carved in stone.”
Ball even admitted the strategy “may not be obvious to all our players” — which is putting it mildly. Gears of War: E-Day’s exclusivity has been a running controversy since June, with developers insisting a PS5 version was never planned despite evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, Halo — Xbox’s biggest brand — is about to debut on PlayStation via Halo: Campaign Evolved on physical disc. The mixed signals are enough to give anyone whiplash.
With 1,600 more layoffs planned between now and next summer, and the impact of the recent cuts still being felt across the organization, it’s hard to see how Xbox settles on a coherent strategy anytime soon.
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced: 3 Million Copies in One Week
Ubisoft’s pirate-themed remake is printing money. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced has sold over 3 million units in its first week across all platforms, the publisher announced on its official Assassin’s Creed X account, alongside confirmation that a New Game Plus mode is in the works.
This builds on the already-impressive opening of 2 million units sold, reported on July 9th. On Steam alone, the game peaked at 104,756 concurrent players via SteamDB — surpassing Assassin’s Creed Shadows to become Ubisoft’s best-performing game on Valve’s platform. Given this momentum, Black Flag Resynced has a genuine shot at becoming the best-selling game in the entire Assassin’s Creed franchise.
The launch hasn’t been entirely smooth, however. The game was briefly review-bombed on Steam over the excessive microtransactions and cosmetic skins that have become standard in Ubisoft titles. The overall rating has since recovered, but the criticism reflects a growing fatigue with monetization practices in full-priced games. Worse, a Ubisoft Connect outage briefly rendered the game unplayable on PC — despite it being advertised as playable offline — a black eye for a publisher already fighting an uphill PR battle.
Looking ahead, reports suggest Ubisoft is already working on a Resynced version of the original Assassin’s Creed. While unannounced, a late-2027 launch would coincide with the series’ 20th anniversary. Given Black Flag Resynced’s performance, it seems the Resynced formula is here to stay.
id Software Gutted: Doom Developers Push Back Against Director’s Optimism
The fallout from Microsoft’s July layoffs continues to ripple through the industry, and id Software — the legendary studio behind Doom and Quake — is emerging as one of the most painful casualties.
Doom director Hugo Martin recently pushed back against reports that the studio had been reduced to little more than a support studio, striking an optimistic tone during a livestream. But according to a report from Game Developer, “multiple anonymous sources” — current and former id Software employees — directly contradict his assessment.
The numbers are stark: around two-thirds of the developers who remained at id Software and worked on Doom (2016) were laid off earlier this month. That includes people described as integral to the veteran team. One source told Game Developer: “I don’t agree with Hugo’s statement and many who were laid off were upset by those comments and saw it as viewing their contributions as insignificant to the success of our games. I’ve been a gamer my whole life. If you cut a stat in half everyone would call that nerfed. In truth the Doom team is half here, half thrown away.”
Another source pointed out that Martin’s assessment of the studio’s current size only looks reasonable because there was already a “massive turnover and exodus” at id Software between 2010 and 2011. The studio that made Doom 2016 — itself born from the ashes of the cancelled Doom 4, a game that nearly killed the studio — was rebuilt with heavy hiring and external support. Now, severely trimmed down again, it’s fair to question whether id Software can produce another triple-A shooter on its own under Microsoft’s current expectations.
Meanwhile, Doom: The Dark Ages recently received its expansion-sized Revelations DLC, and Xbox leadership is reportedly “very interested” in more Doom and Quake games. Whether the studio that defined the FPS genre will still have the talent to make them remains an open — and increasingly uncomfortable — question.
Game Pass Reality Check: Former Forza Horizon 5 Director Speaks Out
Mike Brown, the former director of Forza Horizon 5 at Playground Games who now leads development on the open-world racer Clutch at Maverick Games, has offered one of the most candid assessments of Xbox Game Pass’s trajectory to date.
In an interview with MinnMax, Brown said Xbox “invested a fortune in the concept of Game Pass as a service, which led to loads of teams being acquired, loads of games being funded, loads of people getting jobs, all with a vision of getting regular games landing in this service for players.” The problem? “The reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices that they needed to pay in order to make that business viable.”
It’s a brutal but honest assessment. Game Pass numbers were reportedly well below desired targets, and last year’s price hike — an attempt to make the math work — was reversed by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma at the expense of putting new Call of Duty games on the service at launch. The result is the current mess: studios being shut down or spun off, thousands of jobs lost, and a subscription service that doesn’t generate enough revenue to justify the empire Microsoft built around it.
Brown, to his credit, defended the concept behind Game Pass even as he diagnosed its failure. “It’s a good idea. Let’s have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people. We’ll have a really diverse selection of games on there. We’ll get a load of studios involved. We’ll make some games that probably couldn’t exist otherwise.” The tragedy is that the idea was sound, but the execution — driven by Microsoft’s relentless acquisition sprees and unrealistic growth targets — proved unsustainable.
Brown also had warm words for former Xbox leader Sarah Bond, who was “somewhat unceremoniously disappeared” earlier this year when Asha Sharma took over: “Every time she spoke, she was so sharp, intelligent, impressive. It’s one of those people where you could almost just lean back a bit when they speak because you almost feel a little bit comforted by how competent they are.”
Game Pass isn’t going away — it remains a core part of Xbox’s strategy. But its role in the division’s future, and whether it can ever justify the infrastructure Microsoft built around it, remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in gaming.
The Hardware Crisis: Valve, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo All Raising Prices
If you’ve been thinking about buying a new console or handheld, now might be the time — because prices are only going one direction, and it’s not down.
Valve, which recently shipped its expensive Steam Machine at a minimum of £879 ($1,049), has learned the hard way that the component price crisis shows no signs of abating. Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told Bloomberg: “Honestly, it’s still getting worse. Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months.”
In other words, the prices you’re seeing now are based on component costs from months ago — the real costs are already higher, and a Steam Machine price increase seems likely. This crisis extends well beyond Valve:
- Microsoft announced significant Xbox Series X/S price increases effective August 1st, and expects component prices to double again by autumn 2027.
- Sony has raised PS5 prices multiple times, including the PS5 Pro and PlayStation Portal.
- Nintendo announced a Switch 2 price hike taking effect September 1st.
The root cause is the AI datacenter-driven shortage of memory and storage components. RAM and flash storage prices have been climbing as tech giants hoover up supply for AI infrastructure, and consumer electronics manufacturers are left fighting for what remains. Aldehayyat was hopeful that pricing would eventually correct itself, but the timeline for that correction remains uncertain.
For gamers, the practical implication is clear: the era of affordable gaming hardware may be on hold indefinitely. If you want a console, a handheld, or a PC upgrade, waiting for a price drop might not be a viable strategy this time around.
Star Wars: KOTOR Remake — Re-Reveal Planned for This Year, 2028 Release Window
The perpetually on-again, off-again Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake may finally be re-revealed this year, according to reliable Star Wars insider “100% Star Wars.” The remake, which was first announced in late 2021 before changing studios from Aspyr to Saber Interactive, has been development radio silence for years.
According to the report, sources inside Saber say the game’s best-case scenario was a mid-to-late 2027 release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Star Wars. By slipping to 2028, the remake would align with the original game’s 25th birthday — a fitting milestone for one of the most beloved RPGs of all time.
The insider claims development under Saber has been “progressing well” over the past three years since the studio started from scratch. “They’ve been hiring some extremely high-end talent from across the industry and Saber is very much a unified front when it comes to the development of this game, with resources and talent being pulled from all over the company.”
Competition is brewing, however. Original KOTOR director Casey Hudson is working on Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic — a spiritual successor of sorts — at his new studio. At this point, which game arrives first is an open question. But the hunger for a return to the Old Republic era is clearly strong, and Star Wars fans may eventually have two contenders to choose from.
Jagex Wants RuneScape to Topple World of Warcraft
In a gaming landscape dominated by layoffs and studio closures, Jagex is swimming against the current. CEO Jon Bellamy recently shared his aspiration for RuneScape to become the biggest MMO in the world within five years — which would mean toppling World of Warcraft from its long-held throne.
“The dream is we’re not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world, we’re the number one,” Bellamy told The Game Business. “There’s a big ol’ gap between us and number one. But we know if we get it right, we can make headways.”
The plan involves three pillars: Old School RuneScape, RuneScape, and the survival crafting spinoff RuneScape: Dragonwilds, which launches out of Early Access this September. Bellamy isn’t worried about splitting the audience: “I’m not worried if the strawberry ice-cream outsells the chocolate ice-cream. We just want to sell ice-cream.”
The stats back up the ambition. The average daily play session for Old School RuneScape is just under five hours, with a playerbase whose average age is 32 — meaning these are working adults who still dedicate significant time to the game. As Bellamy noted, millions of professionals have RuneScape open on one screen while working on another. It’s a uniquely sticky audience that WoW, with its declining subscriber base, can’t quite match in the same way.
RuneScape launched over 25 years ago and is still going strong. Whether it can actually overtake World of Warcraft remains to be seen, but Jagex’s patient, multi-pronged approach is a refreshing contrast to the boom-and-bust cycles that have defined so much of the industry lately.
DCKO: Warner Bros.’ DC Fighting Game Has a Name Problem and a Platform Bet
Warner Bros. has announced a new DC Comics fighting game for mobile, and the internet immediately noticed two things: the name is DCKO (which everyone is reading as “Dicko”), and it’s only coming to mobile — not PC or console.
Developed by indie studio Dropfake, DCKO is a free-to-play 2v2 tag fighter officially licensed by DC. The announcement trailer shows a variety of DC characters in combat with a comic-book stylization, but no unedited gameplay footage has been released. The game launches next year, with pre-registration already open.
The name, clearly inspired by Riot Games’ 2XKO naming convention, was immediately memed. The official DCKO X account leaned into it: “And we own that BIG DCKO ENERGY!” Fighting game legends have been more measured — Sonicfox called it “lowkey so fire,” while Justin Wong said he’d “definitely be playing this.”
The bigger issue is the platform choice. Many fighting game fans were hoping for Injustice 3 from NetherRealm, and a mobile-only DC fighter feels like a bait-and-switch. But the mobile gaming sector is growing — revenue was up 4 percent year-over-year, time spent up 7.9 percent, and sessions up 12 percent according to Sensor Tower’s 2025 report. Given the current cost of buying a PS5 or Xbox, a free-to-play mobile fighter might actually reach a wider audience than a premium console title ever could.
The Bottom Line: A Defining Week for Gaming in 2026
This week’s headlines paint a picture of an industry in transition — and not always a comfortable one. Call of Duty is expanding to Switch 2 while its movement speed divides players. Marathon is experimenting with PvE to save itself. Xbox can’t decide what exclusivity means. id Software lost two-thirds of its Doom 2016 veterans. Game Pass’s business model has been exposed as unsustainable. Hardware prices are climbing across the board. And yet, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced sold 3 million copies in a week, Jagex is dreaming of overtaking WoW, and a KOTOR remake might finally be resurfacing.
The gaming industry in July 2026 is a study in contrasts: record revenues alongside record layoffs, ambitious bets alongside cautious retreats, beloved franchises being revived while beloved studios are being gutted. The only certainty is that the games — and the conversations around them — aren’t getting any quieter.
What are you playing this week? The Modern Warfare 4 beta kicks off August 21st, Marathon’s Vault Breaker is live now, and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is available on all platforms. Pick your battlefield.