Indie Dev Cancels ‘HAAK’ For Xbox And Criticises Microsoft Over 14 Months Of Delays

Who fancies a bit of Monday drama in Xbox land? Here at the PX offices we could take it or leave it to be honest, but the story around indie platformer HAAK is becoming more interesting by the minute – so here we are.

To try and sum things up, basically, the team behind this indie title (already released on PC, Switch & mobile) has taken to Twitter to publicly criticise Microsoft over its own ID@Xbox experience. The dev claims that it has “spent over 14 months trying to apply for game publication” without much help at all from Xbox. This has resulted in them cancelling the Xbox release of HAAK and putting out a lengthy statement on the matter.

However, this story is now firmly in the public sphere; which means plenty of eyes are now on it. First of all, the team itself has shared a private Microsoft response to the game’s very public cancellation — where Xbox offers to try and help out — and then, the likes of former Xbox exec Major Nelson and Epic’s Tim Sweeney have also gotten involved, with the latter even pushing for a response from Phil Spencer.

Here’s what the team’s initial statement had to say:

And here’s the follow-up statement from last night, alongside a screenshotted email from Microsoft:

For now, we’ve not seen a response from Phil or any of the current Xbox exec team, but others have responded to this story with mixed thoughts. Some replies are calling out the HAAK developer for seemingly not taking up Microsoft’s offer to help, while other indie devs — including BROK developer COWCAT and Aaero maker Mad Fellows — have talked about their much better experiences with the ID@Xbox team.

Anyway, as things stand, HAAK is still seemingly not coming to Xbox in the wake of all of this drama – although that could easily change in the coming days, depending on where this story goes next and what HAAK developer Blingame puts out there. It’s all fun and games, eh?