Cory Barlog Fired Himself From God of War

The Handoff

Cory Barlog directed God of War (2018) to a Game of the Year sweep at The Game Awards. Before that, he’d directed God of War II in 2007 and won a BAFTA for the writing.

When Santa Monica Studio revealed God of War Ragnarök at the 2021 PlayStation Showcase, Barlog wasn’t the one presenting it as director. Eric Williams was. Williams had joined the studio in 2004 and touched every God of War game since, but always as a combat designer, never as the person in the chair. Barlog moved to producer. He described what that felt like in an interview with GamesRadar+: “stepping outside of yourself… challenged on a daily basis to know when to take your hands off the wheel.”⊕

Santa Monica frames the switch as tradition: rotate the director’s chair, bring in someone who hasn’t spent three years staring at the same problem. Barlog put it this way: “Corey is the only repeat director and rightfully so: he’s damn good at what he does,” adding that “the important thing for us is to get a fresh perspective each time.”⊕ He wasn’t fired. He fired himself, on a schedule the studio had already normalized before Ragnarök ever needed it.

What Actually Changed Hands

The friction showed up fast, and not where anyone predicted it would. Williams worried less about the story or the combat systems he’d spent seventeen years building than about being compared to Barlog. He ran the production his own way from day one.

His way involved GIFs and Excel spreadsheets. A lot of them. The team had to acclimate⊕ to a director who tracked the entire game’s production against a single spreadsheet. Williams initially read their confusion as resistance. It was actually a studio that had spent years building habits around one person’s instincts for what to track and what to trust, now needing new habits for someone else’s. The org effectively swapped operating systems overnight, with no migration guide.

Barlog didn’t disappear from that process. He became what he called the sounding board: not approving decisions, but pressure-testing them. “Eric is the sounding board and also the boundary limit testing,”⊕ he said of their dynamic. It meant Williams kept the one thing hardest to hand off in any transition: a second opinion who already knew where the bodies were buried, without the veto power over calls that were now Williams’ to make.

The Discipline Nobody Puts in the Deck

Succession planning gets talked about as a staffing problem. Find someone qualified, document the runbooks, announce the transition, done. Santa Monica’s version looks nothing like that, because the hard part was never finding Eric Williams. He’d been in the building since 2004. The hard part was Barlog giving up the specific muscle memory that made him good at the job, on a timeline that had nothing to do with whether Ragnarök’s roadmap felt ready for it.

A PM who’s spent three years running a product line knows things that never made it into a doc: which stakeholder objection is real and which one is theater, and which metric moves for reasons nobody wrote down. They know which corner can be cut safely, and which one only looks safe. None of that transfers by scheduling a knowledge-transfer meeting. It transfers by the outgoing owner staying close enough to catch the mistakes that come from not having it yet, without fixing them themselves.

Williams inherited Barlog’s problems, minus Barlog’s answers, plus a producer in the room whose job was now to test Williams’ answers instead of supplying his own. He said he didn’t want Ragnarök considered “his game” while a separate “Cory’s God of War” existed out there.⊕ He had to inherit the job fully enough that the work held together, without inheriting so much of the previous owner’s process that he was just running Barlog’s system with worse fluency than Barlog had.

Ragnarök shipped in November 2022 and won Best Narrative and Best Action/Adventure Game at The Game Awards. Barlog is still at Santa Monica, reportedly serving as creative director on the studio’s next project. Nobody’s asked him to direct another God of War since.