The games industry can be ruthless. Even when you have massive hits under your belt, there are no guarantees. Bruce Straley, a longtime Naughty Dog developer who co-directed several of the studio’s biggest releases, found that out the hard way when his new studio apparently lost funding midway through a project.
The timeline was recounted by Quentin Cobb, a designer who worked at Naughty Dog on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4, in an interview with Kiwi Talkz. “He was funded by Microsoft,” Cobb recalls. “On July 2 [2025], the same day I got laid off, his funding got pulled for his game.”
Microsoft conducted a huge round of layoffs in early July 2025, cutting around 9,000 jobs, many of which were within various parts of Xbox. It seems some in-development pieces of work were part of this cost-cutting measure, including Straley’s new puzzler, Coven of the Chicken Foot, which is being made by his new team, Wildflower Interactive.
Luckily, he managed to turn things around, by getting a trailer out as part of The Game Awards that attracted other funding sources. “There were several months where they thought they were done,” Cobb says. “It was game over, because of July 2.”
Sharing co-director credits with Neil Druckmann on Uncharted 2, Uncharted 4, and The Last of Us and its Left Behind DLC, Straley brings huge pedigree to the table. Anything new under his tutelage is worth a gander, or so you’d imagine. But that’s the landscape of the triple-A space right now, and of Xbox Game Studios.
Microsoft’s games department has been going through it for some time now, and current CEO Asha Sharma and CCO Matt Booty have said more turbulence is coming in what they’ve called an “Xbox reset.” Meanwhile, Coven of the Chicken Foot is still without a release window, but development seems to be moving along fine now. We can only hope that much continues.
