The director of No Rest for the Wicked says the Xbox Series S is responsible for the Xbox version not releasing alongside the PS5 one.
No Rest for the Wicked is the latest game from Moon Studios, the developer behind the Ori games.
It was released in early access on PC in October 2024, and during this week’s PlayStation State of Play presentation it was announced that the full Version 1.0 release will be coming to PS5 in October 2026.
The studio subsequently confirmed on its own website that the game will also be coming out of early access on Steam and releasing alongside the PS5 version in October 2026, but that the release date for Xbox Series X/S and Switch 2 versions is “TBD”.
On the game’s official Discord server, one user asked why the game wouldn’t be coming to Xbox in October too, to which game director and studio co-founder Thomas Mahler said optimising the game for Xbox Series S was causing delays.
“Series S is making that rough,” he explained. “We’ll ship it after in a good way once it’s optimized like crazy for Switch 2 and Xbox.”
Another user joked that the game will likely be further optimised for mobile after this. “Series S and mobile specs aren’t too far apart at this point,” Mahler replied.
This isn’t the first time Mahler has said the studio is prioritising PlayStation over Xbox, but in the past he has given a number of reasons for this – not just the work needed to port to Series S, but also the fact that more PS5 consoles have been sold than Xbox consoles.
Last July, Mahler stated in the game’s Discord server: “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 Microsoft to see what makes sense for Xbox.”
After some players suggested Mahler’s comment came across as a “shakedown”, he replied: “In order to get [to full release] fast, we’ll first support the platform that has the most users purely out of resource reasons. We’re a comparatively small indie studio, so doing a console port at the quality level we want is not a small task.
“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.”
