Last of Us director apologises to God of War Laufey team
Bruce Straley has apologised to the team making God of War Laufey after saying he was "not excited" by the upcoming game's gameplay.
The former Naughty Dog director posted the apology on X/Twitter. He said the remark had been lifted out of context and turned into clickbait. He said sorry for pulling Sony Santa Monica into a row it did not ask for.
The apology, reported on 20 September 2026, centred on the Laufey developers Eurogamer. Straley said he had dragged them into "uninvited and unnecessary negative attention" VGC. He added that he had been "blown away" by the lengths Santa Monica Studio had gone to on the game GameSpot.
Straley knows blockbuster production from the inside. He spent 18 years at Naughty Dog. He was game director on The Last of Us and co-director on the first two Uncharted games before leaving in 2017. Those are large-team, big-budget adventures built around story and action.
His original remarks came in an Edge magazine cover story titled "The game industry is broken - can we fix it?" In the interview, Straley said he will "probably never" make the triple-A game he wants. Triple-A, in plain terms, means a blockbuster made by hundreds of people with budgets to match. He described modern games at that scale as "boring".
Laufey came up as his example. He said the game looks mindblowing pixel by pixel. But he said he was not excited by what the player actually does from minute to minute. Craft on screen, in his view, was not the same as thrill in the hands.
He now works at the other end of the scale. Straley leads a small team at Wildflower Interactive. The studio is making Coven of the Chicken Foot. Few people. Smaller budget. Shorter lines of communication.
What makes this stand out is how fast a broad argument became a story about one team. Straley was questioning what huge productions ask players to do. Laufey became the headline for that view. The apology seeks to separate the two, praising the Santa Monica developers while keeping his wider criticism of blockbusters intact. That wider view is why his name still carries weight in conversations about how games get made.
