Moon Studios director Thomas Mahler has confirmed that No Rest for the Wicked won’t launch on Xbox alongside the PS5 version, and he’s pointing the finger directly at the Xbox Series S.
In short, Mahler says the lower-spec Xbox console is “making that rough” for the studio as it works on the console rollout of its dark fantasy action RPG.
The game is still in Steam Early Access, where it launched in April 2024. Moon Studios is now lining up its full 1.0 release, with PS5 prioritized as the first console destination. Xbox is still planned, but it won’t arrive at the same time.
This isn’t the first time Mahler has hinted at the situation. Back in July, he told fans on the studio’s Discord that “given current market conditions, we might only release on PS5 and potentially Switch 2 for the time being,” adding that the team would “have to discuss things with Microsoft to see what makes sense for Xbox.”
When some took that as Moon Studios trying to pressure Microsoft, Mahler clarified it was a resource decision. “In order to get [to full release] fast, we’ll first support the platform that has the most users purely out of resource reasons,” he said. “We’re a comparatively small indie studio, so doing a console port at the quality level we want is not a small task.”
The new Series S comment adds the technical layer to that earlier explanation.
Why the Series S keeps tripping devs up
Here’s the issue. The Xbox Series X and PS5 both pack 16GB of unified memory. The Series S has 10GB, and only around 8GB of that is actually available to games after the system takes its cut. The GPU is also significantly weaker, and memory bandwidth is lower.
Microsoft generally requires Xbox Series games to support both consoles, so studios can’t just ship on Series X and call it a day. Lowering resolution helps with GPU load, but it doesn’t solve memory pressure from textures, lighting data, streaming, simulation, or long-session leaks. For a small indie team, that extra optimization pass eats real time.
Players testing the Early Access build on PC have reported stuttering, frame drops after long sessions, and possible memory leak behavior, even on top-end rigs like an RTX 5080 paired with a Ryzen 7800X3D. The hub area Sacrament has been singled out as a performance hot spot. If the game isn’t fully stable on beefy PCs yet, locking it down on a 10GB fixed box is a tall order.
The closest recent comparison is Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian’s Xbox version landed well after the PS5 release, largely because of Series S limitations. Microsoft eventually granted a feature exception, letting the Series S version ship without local split-screen co-op while Series X kept it.
