Ori developer Moon Studios says that it’ll be prioritizing PS5–and potentially, Switch 2–over Xbox for the console port of its PC game No Rest for the Wicked, citing “current market conditions” as the reason why. While the studio isn’t ruling out an Xbox Series X|S release entirely, CEO Thomas Mahler added that it just made sense to prioritize PS5 before considering other platforms.
“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,” Mahler explained on the No Rest for the Wicked Discord (via Eurogamer).
In a social media post, Mahler clarified his statement further, explaining that Moon Studios is looking to eventually “ship on all platforms,” and on the NeoGAF forum, he mentioned that optimization for PS5 was easier in comparison to Xbox Series X|S. For a small developer like Moon Studios, this simply made more economic sense for the studio to focus on that platform, Mahler explained.
“We’ll first support the platform that has the most users purely out of resource reasons,” Mahler wrote. “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 PS5 Pro. So we’re most likely going to do PS5 [and ] PS5 Pro first and launch there in order to make fans happy and supply other ports later. So there’s nothing to see here; it’s just common sense with us having to make the right moves given the resources we have while making sure we give players what they want as fast as possible.”
Moon Studios wouldn’t be the first developer to bring its game to PS5 first and Xbox Series X|S later, and data released last year suggested that the PS5 may have outsold the Xbox Series X|S by roughly a 2:1 margin. That divide may have increased further since then, as Sony recently confirmed that it had 49 million monthly users on PS5 as of April 30, 2024.
Microsoft remains cagey with exact figures related to its Xbox Series X|S console, and over the last couple of months, it has adopted a “this is an Xbox” multiplatform strategy that has seen more of its formerly exclusive games released on PS5. It has also teamed up with Asus to make an Xbox-branded handheld gaming PC.
