Moon Studios founder Thomas Mahler has put the Xbox Series S squarely in the crosshairs, publicly stating the hardware is responsible for delaying No Rest for the Wicked's Xbox release past its confirmed PS5 launch window. The game is set to hit PS5 in October alongside its version 1.0 release, but Xbox players are getting no date at all.
What Mahler actually said
The comments came through Discord, where Mahler responded directly to a fan asking why there was no Xbox release date attached to the 1.0 announcement. His answer was blunt: "Series S is making that rough. We'll ship it after in a good way once it's optimized like crazy for Switch 2 and Xbox."
He didn't stop there. When another user joked that a mobile port would follow, Mahler quipped that "Series S and mobile specs aren't too far apart at this point." That's a pointed comment, and it signals just how much of a ceiling the Series S is imposing on the team's development timeline.
To be clear, this isn't a PlayStation exclusivity deal. The PS5 version is launching because Moon Studios got it to a state they're happy with. The Xbox version is simply not there yet, and the Series S is the specific bottleneck.
A pattern that keeps repeating
Here's the thing: this isn't an isolated incident. The Xbox Series S has been a recurring friction point across the current console generation, and the pattern is hard to ignore at this point.
Black Myth: Wukong was delayed on Xbox by roughly a year. Developer Game Science CEO Yongar Feng-Ji confirmed in January 2025 that the Series S's 10 GB of shared memory created serious optimization headaches. When the game finally landed on Xbox, the studio acknowledged the delay was a direct result of the extra work needed to get it running properly on the weaker hardware.
Larian Studios ran into similar walls with Baldur's Gate 3. The game launched on PC in August 2023, PS5 in September 2023, and didn't reach Xbox until December 2023. The holdup was split-screen co-op on Series S, a feature that required Microsoft's own engineers to step in and assist before it could ship.
Three separate studios, three separate games, the same hardware constraint. The key here is that Microsoft's policy requiring full feature parity between Series X and Series S titles means developers can't simply ship a stripped-down Series S version and move on. Every feature has to work on both, or the game doesn't ship on either.
What this means for No Rest for the Wicked players right now
For PC players already in the Early Access build, the 1.0 release is the milestone to watch. The game has been in Steam Early Access since April 2024, and the October PS5 launch date marks the full version 1.0 release across those platforms.
Xbox players are in a holding pattern with no confirmed date. Mahler's comments suggest the team plans to ship the Xbox version after the Switch 2 and Xbox optimization work is complete, but no timeline was given beyond that.
The Xbox version of No Rest for the Wicked has no confirmed release date. Moon Studios has stated it will arrive after PS5 and Switch 2, pending optimization work specifically for Xbox Series S.
The broader question this raises is whether Microsoft's next console, Project Helix, will repeat the two-SKU approach. With Xbox CEO Asha Sharma taking a notably aggressive stance on the platform's direction, some industry observers expect the next generation to consolidate around a single hardware target. That would eliminate the Series S problem entirely, but that's a future generation's fix, not a solution for developers shipping games right now.
For players jumping into the game ahead of 1.0, the No Rest for the Wicked best builds guide is worth bookmarking before the full release shakes up the meta. If you're newer to the game, the No Rest for the Wicked beginner's guide covers the early-game foundations that carry through into 1.0.
