No Rest for the Wicked came to Early Access last year and some fans are patiently waiting for it to finally hit console. The head of developer Moon Studios recently told fans the action-RPG Soulslike will likely come to PlayStation 5 first. Xbox, where the studio’s critically-acclaimed Ori games were once exclusives, will be last due to “current market conditions.”
“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,” Moon CEO Thomas Mahler, who hates having his Discord comments quoted by journalists, told fans on Discord. While that made it sound like No Rest for the Wicked could skip Microsoft’s platform entirely, he was quick to foll0w up clarifying that the grimdark fantasy adventure will hit Xbox eventually.
“There’s nothing to officially confirm yet,” he added on X. “We want to support consoles and just looking at the numbers, PS5 makes the most sense at the moment. Ultimately we’ll ship on all platforms, but likely not at the same time!”
With PS5 currently sitting at around 80 million consoles sold, the Xbox Series X/S, whose hardware revenue within Microsoft falls precipitously every year, is estimated to have sold less than half that. The Switch 2 only just launched, but is already breaking launch records and is expected to continue the momentum of its 155-million-unit-selling predecessor. So if you’re a small team allocating limited resources for porting your PC release, the case for prioritizing Xbox is becoming harder and harder to make.
The problem’s been pronounced enough that Microsoft published a developer blog post last fall asking studios for feedback. “If you are making video games, we’re interested in hearing from you,” it read. “If you aren’t on Xbox, we’d love to know why. And honestly, if you are using our competitor’s products, you probably have a great perspective we could learn from!”
The case of No Rest for the Wicked is especially striking, though, given the size of the team (estimated at over 80 people) and Moon Studios’ history with Xbox. Ori and the Blind Forest was a 2015 exclusive that proved to be a bright spot for the Xbox One as it recovered from its rough launch. The follow-up, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, did the same for the Xbox Series X/S. While both games have since been ported to Switch, neither was ever made available on PlayStation.
No Rest for the Wicked, which swaps snappy 2D platforming for weighty top-down dungeon crawling, will now reverse that trend. I guess there’s no Game Pass deal on the table this time around.
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