As revealed earlier this week during Sony’s recent State of Play, Moon Studios’ top-down action RPG No Rest for the Wicked is making the leap to PlayStation 5 after an extended early access period on PC. But Xbox fans wanting to play the next game from the studio behind Ori and the Will of the Wisps will have to wait while the studio optimizes the game more so it can run on the tiny Xbox Series S.
On June 2, Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler responded to a fan asking about the lack of an Xbox port despite Wicked coming to PS5 in October. Mahler, who in the past has had issues with the media quoting his Discord messages, provided an honest and blunt reply that laid some of the blame on the Xbox Series S:
“Series S is making that rough,” said Mahler when talking about porting the game. “We’ll ship it after in a good way once it’s optimized like crazy for Switch 2 and Xbox.”
As a reminder, Xbox requires all games that ship on Xbox Series X to also be playable on Series S and has strict parity rules, too. This has caused issues before. A big example involved Baldur’s Gate 3 and the devs wanting to ship without split-screen on Series S, something Xbox wouldn’t allow. Eventually, Xbox and Larian worked it out, and Baldur’s Gate 3 shipped on Series S without split screen.
That Discord comment started to spread around the wider web and led to Mahler, who previously suggested Xbox would not be a priority for the studio, replying to a different fan on Twitter with a more detailed response denying any kind of exclusivity deal and again blaming the Series S for the Xbox port being delayed.
“There’s no exclusivity deal. We just wanted to get Wicked into the hands of console players as quickly as we possibly can since the console crowd overwhelmingly got frustrated with us only supporting Steam / Steam Deck so far,” said Mahler.
“Shipping on Xbox wouldn’t have been a problem if we’d only be [sic] talking Xbox Series X. But Series S is a requirement to ship, and the biggest issue there is memory. On Series S, we only have 8 gigs, and since we’re constantly streaming massive amounts of data in and out, we’re not quite there yet to hit that spec, and we won’t be until October. That pass to hit Switch 2 and Xbox Series S specs will have to come afterwards cause it requires even more hardcore optimizations. And none of you would want a bad port – you’d want Wicked to feel awesome to play wherever you play it. And that just takes time.”
Xbox Series S holding back games?
In response to the news that No Rest for the Wicked would be delayed due to Series S, game developer and former Valve writer Chet Faliszek said that he wished Xbox would let devs not ship on Series S, claiming that he and his team had to do “so much stupid stuff” to get co-op shooter The Anacrusis running on the weaker machine.
Another game dev, Nic Weyand, said on Bluesky that the “parity issue between S and X sucks.” And he’s not alone in struggling to get games running on Xbox’s weaker, cheaper machine. The devs behind Battlefield 6 told me they struggled to get the FPS running well on the smaller console. Other games have faced similar Series S problems.
It’s wild to think that later this year, assuming no last-minute delays happen, Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto 6 on Xbox Series S. What will that look like? What will it run like? Or is it possible that, under new leadership, Xbox lets Rockstar break the parity rule and ship GTA 6 exclusively on Series X? If any game could force Xbox to make that change, it would be GTA 6. We’ll find out later this year.
