Xbox Passed On the Exact Game Its Critics Say AAA Needs

Bruce Straley spent a career building the kind of games he now says AAA has stopped making, so when he said he was "not excited" about what God of War: Laufey is doing, and later apologized to Santa Monica Studio for it, the apology was the smaller half of the story. The bigger half sat one paragraph down, where GameSpot noted that Straley's current project, the puzzle-platformer Coven of the Chickenfoot, was originally set to be published by Xbox before Xbox dropped it, according to another developer.

We want to believe the platform we picked chases exactly the kind of innovation Straley says the industry has stopped funding. That belief survives a lot: quiet months, price hikes, a subscription that runs on hope some quarters. It does not survive well against a developer who built Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us, who is now telling anyone who will listen that AAA has "no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas," and whose small, strange, hand-carved witch game was on our own publisher's slate before it wasn't.

The apology and the argument underneath it

Straley's statement was gracious about the specifics: he called Laufey's visuals "mindblowing," said he was "blown away" by Santa Monica Studio's craft, and admitted naming the game by title was "my mistake" in an otherwise general complaint. His broader argument, that games-as-a-service chasing the next Overwatch or Fortnite is "not a viable strategy" and reflects leadership that doesn't understand its own brand, was aimed at the industry writ large, not at any one studio.

Grading our own house on the same curve

Here is where I'd normally grade my own platform gently, the way loyalists do, and note that at least Xbox once had the game on the list. Then I catch myself doing it, because having a project and dropping it before it shipped is not evidence of taste, it's evidence of exactly the pattern Straley is describing: a business gap where a studio's conviction about its own brand should be. Coven of the Chickenfoot is still in development, now backed by an unnamed financier instead of us, which means the innovation Straley is asking the industry to fund is currently being funded by someone else.

What would actually clear the account

Straley's read on AAA leadership doesn't need our agreement to be worth reporting, and it doesn't need Xbox's involvement to be true. But if a platform is going to claim it wants the Half-Life 2s and BioShocks of the next decade instead of another live-service swing, the cheapest way to prove it is to keep the small, odd, hand-built games it already signed. Publishing one through to release would cost us nothing we haven't already spent once, and it would be worth more than every roadmap slide about creator-first values combined.