"We would love for people to be able to play the game on Xbox, but not until Microsoft and/or Xbox have been removed as BDS boycott targets."
That's the position of House House, the Australian studio behind Untitled Goose Game, in a statement published directly to the Big Walk official website. The message is clear, deliberate, and worth understanding in full.
Big Walk launched on August 4 on PS5, PC, Mac, and Nintendo Switch 2 to widespread acclaim. Xbox Series X and S were never part of the plan, and for months, fans kept asking why. Now House House has answered.
The BDS movement and Microsoft's place on its list
House House's decision ties directly to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led campaign that calls for economic and cultural pressure on entities it identifies as complicit in actions against Palestinians. BDS has designated Microsoft Games and Xbox as priority boycott targets, pointing specifically to Microsoft's contracts and partnerships with the Israeli government.
The studio's statement doesn't editorialize much on the geopolitics. It points readers toward BDS resources and a People Make Games video for context, and keeps the message focused: the studio supports the boycott, and that support has a direct consequence for where Big Walk is available.
Microsoft's relationship with the Israeli government has been a documented source of internal tension at the company, with employee protests surfacing publicly over the past couple of years. House House is now one of the most prominent development studios to take a formal stance on that relationship through a product decision.
What the studio actually said
The full statement, published to bigwalk.game, reads in part:
The studio is unusually direct about the tension this creates with its own intentions. Big Walk was designed as a co-op experience, built around the idea of groups of friends exploring a vast island together. Keeping it off Xbox means some players simply can't access it with their friend groups, and House House acknowledges that plainly: "This decision means that some people will miss out on playing Big Walk with their friends, and we understand the disappointment we're causing. We are disappointed too."
That's not a typical corporate hedge. It's a studio saying it's absorbing a real cost to its own stated goals because it considers the political stance more important.
What this means for Xbox players right now
The short version: there's no Xbox version of Big Walk coming anytime soon, and the condition House House has set, Microsoft being removed from BDS's priority list, is not something that happens quickly or easily.
For players sitting on Xbox as their primary platform, the options are limited. The game is available on PC, which covers a significant overlap with the Xbox player base, and PS5 remains the console option. If you want to know exactly where you can play and what each version offers, the Big Walk platform availability guide breaks it all down.
Here's the thing: this is a genuinely unusual situation in the games industry. Developers have pulled games from platforms before over business disputes or exclusivity deals, but a studio explicitly boycotting a platform for political reasons and publishing a formal statement explaining why is rare. House House is a small, independent studio with a track record of doing things on its own terms, and this decision fits that pattern.
The broader picture for indie studios and platform politics
The key here is that House House isn't just making a quiet business decision. Publishing the statement publicly turns this into a visible act, one that other developers, publishers, and players can respond to. It puts a question on the table that the industry rarely discusses openly: should studios consider the political affiliations of platform holders when deciding where to release?
For most large publishers, the answer is almost certainly no, at least not publicly. For a small, independent studio like House House, which doesn't depend on platform holder relationships the way major publishers do, the calculus is different. The studio has the freedom to take this position without the same commercial exposure a bigger team would face.
Big Walk has been one of the standout titles of 2026. Check out our full review for a deeper look at what makes the game worth playing, and if you're already in, the Big Walk trophy and achievement guide covers all 12 unlockables across the game.
