Moon Studios, the developer behind the Ori games, will focus on PS5 over Xbox for its forthcoming game No Rest for the Wicked due to “current market conditions”.
No Rest for the Wicked is currently in early access on PC, with a console release due in future. But on the game’s Discord, studio CEO Thomas Mahler stated: “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.”
It’s quite the turnaround, considering Ori and the Blind Forest (and its sequel) was first released on Xbox with Microsoft as publisher.
Responding to a further comment on social media, Mahler walked back his statement slightly.
“There’s nothing to officially confirm yet,” he said. “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!”
Over on the NeoGAF forum, Mahler provided a further response that this wasn’t a “shakedown” of Microsoft but “common f*cking sense”.
“Folks, can we drop the conspiracy theory insanity?” he began, adding that co-op and console support are what the community want the most.
“And in order to get there fast, we’ll first support the platform that has the most users purely out of resource reasons,” he continued. “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 optimise 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.”
No Rest for the Wicked gets off to a “shaky start”, according to our review of the early access release in April 2024. However the game has received multiple updates since then and sits with a Mostly Positive rating on Steam.
Back in March, Moon Studios secured the publishing rights to the game from Take-Two and announced it was a fully independent studio.