The Xbox Series S is taking some heat once again following comments made by the founder of Moon Studio, the team behind action RPG No Rest for the Wicked, which has been available on Steam Early Access since 2024.
During the PlayStation State of Play, it was confirmed the game was coming to PS5 this October in celebration of its 1.0 release, but Xbox users will have to wait. This isn’t due to any kind of marketing deal with PlayStation. Rather, it has to do with limitations with the Xbox Series S. In response to a fan inquring about the lack of an Xbox release date, studio founder and game director Thomas Mahler pointed to the Series S.
“Series S is making that rough,” said Mahler in a comment on Discord. “We’ll ship it after in a good way once it’s optimized like crazy for Switch 2 and Xbox.”
Another user joked that a mobile version would follow the Xbox and Switch 2 versions, to which Mahler responded: “Series S and mobile specs aren’t too far apart at this point.”
This is hardly the first time something like this has happened. The Xbox version of Black Myth: Wukong was delayed by a year and it was heavily rumored that it may be due to difficulties developing for the consoles. Microsoft responded to these rumors noting that it had not been informed of such troubles, but developer Game Science later suggested those rumors may have had some truth to them. Game Science CEO Yongar Feng-Ji noted in January 2025 that the Xbox Series S’ 10 GBs of shared memory was creating issues with optimization. When the game was eventually released on Xbox, the studio confirmed that the delay was a result of spending extra time trying to optimize the game specificially for Xbox.
Baldur’s Gate 3 also suffered issues when it came to developing for the Xbox Series S. The game had a staggered release across platforms, arriving in August 2023 for PC, September for PS5, and December for Xbox. That wasn’t by choice, necessarily. Larian had troubles getting split-screen co-op to work smoothly on Xbox Series S. The studio even enlisted the help of Microsoft’s own engineers to help get it all functioning.
With all of this said, there has been a lot of discussion throughout the current console generation over whether or not the Xbox Series S is worth the hassles. Microsoft mandates that all Xbox Series X titles must also work on Series S with full feature parity, but it has led to some games being released later on the platform. It begs the question whether Project Helix, the next Xbox console, will have a cheaper and weaker variant – or if Microsoft will go all-in on one SKU. Given how aggressive Xbox’s new CEO Asha Sharma has been, it’s hard to imagine the company doing two consoles again, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
For now, No Rest for the Wicked will release on PS5 on an unspecified date in October. The Xbox release date is currently to be confirmed.
Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN’s news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.
