No Rest for the Wicked has been in early access on PC for over a year now, and is also due to come to consoles with version 1.0. That said, Moon Studios is going to treat the platforms in order of priority… and Xbox is clearly far from being one.
On Discord, Thomas Mahler, the studio’s CEO, made a statement that led to some truly heated exchanges on social networks.
"Btw, given current market conditions, we might only release on PS5 and potentially Switch 2 for the time being – we’ll have to discuss things with MS to see what makes sense for Xbox."
Since Moon Studios is mostly known for the Ori IP, which was once exclusive to Xbox, some users claim that there’s an air of ingratitude from the studio. For his part, Mahler seems to imply that, given that Xbox consoles are becoming more and more PC-like (especially with Steam integration being a thing), a native port might end up being not necessary.
He also mentions that porting No Rest for the Wicked to the Xbox Sereis X and the less powerful Xbox Series S might take a long time. After all, Microsoft forces studios to support both consoles and this would pose some real optimization work.
"Porting to Xbox means porting to Xbox Series X and Series S and that’ll take more time to optimize compared to porting to PS5 and PS5Pro. So we’re most likely going to do PS5/PS5Pro first and launch there in order to make fans happy and supply other ports later."
"That’s literally all there is to it. And yes, we’ll need to discuss with Xbox and Nintendo what the best strategies are to support their platforms and their features in the best way possible and that’ll be an ongoing discussion."
