"Not Far From Mobile", Dev Roasts Series S Specs

"Series S and mobile specs aren't too far apart at this point." That's Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler, responding to a fan on the No Rest for the Wicked Discord server after confirming the game's Xbox port won't ship alongside the PS5 and PC versions this October. It's one of the bluntest public assessments of the Series S hardware I've seen from a working developer, and it lands at a point where Microsoft's parity requirements are looking increasingly difficult to defend.

The context: during this week's PlayStation State of Play, Moon Studios confirmed that No Rest for the Wicked will leave early access and launch its full 1.0 release on PS5 and Steam in October 2026. Xbox Series X/S and Switch 2 versions are listed as "TBD." When fans on Discord asked why Xbox was being left out, Mahler was characteristically direct. "Series S is making that rough," he said. "We'll ship it after in a good way once it's optimized like crazy for Switch 2 and Xbox."

The problem, as Mahler explained in a follow-up on Twitter, isn't the Series X. That console would have been fine. It's the Series S and its 8GB of usable memory. No Rest for the Wicked constantly streams large amounts of data in and out, and Moon Studios can't hit the Series S memory spec yet. "That pass to hit Switch 2 and Xbox Series S specs will have to come afterwards cause it requires even more hardcore optimizations," Mahler wrote. "And none of you would want a bad port."

When another user joked that the game would be ready for mobile after all that optimization work, Mahler fired back with the mobile comparison. That line got the most traction online, and I get why. It's a sitting developer essentially saying the cheapest Xbox console is operating in the same neighbourhood as a phone. Whether that's strictly accurate in every technical dimension is beside the point; it reflects a real frustration that keeps surfacing from studio after studio.

The parity wall

Microsoft's rule is simple: if you ship on Series X, you ship on Series S. There's no opt-out. This policy has been a recurring friction point since the generation started, and the list of games that have bumped into it keeps growing. Baldur's Gate 3 was delayed on Xbox and eventually launched without split-screen on Series S after Larian and Microsoft negotiated a compromise. Black Myth: Wukong took a full year to arrive on the platform. Turok: Origins developer Saber Interactive said publicly at Gamescom 2025 that the Series S simply cannot run its game at 60fps. CD Projekt Red has acknowledged The Witcher 4 will struggle to hit 60fps on the console.

No Rest for the Wicked is a smaller game from a smaller studio, which makes the squeeze even tighter. Moon Studios doesn't have the headcount to brute-force an optimization pass while simultaneously shipping a 1.0 release on two other platforms. Mahler has been upfront about this calculus for over a year. Back in July 2025, he said on Discord that "given current market conditions, we might only release on PS5 and potentially Switch 2 for the time being," citing the cost of console ports and the gap in installed base between PlayStation and Xbox.

Other developers have echoed the sentiment without the same level of candour. Nic Weyand said on Bluesky that "the parity issue between S and X sucks." Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek said he wished Microsoft would let developers skip the Series S entirely, claiming his team had to do "so much stupid stuff" to get co-op shooter The Anacrusis running on it. Battlefield 6's developers have also spoken about struggling with the console.

I think Microsoft's parity rule made sense in 2020 when the goal was to reassure Series S buyers that they weren't getting a second-class console. Six years later, the policy is actively costing Xbox games. Not hypothetically, not in theory. Developers are publicly saying they're shipping on PlayStation first because the Series S optimization burden is too heavy to handle simultaneously. When a studio like Moon, which built its reputation on Xbox with the Ori games, is prioritizing PS5 over Xbox for resource reasons, that should be a signal.

The question everyone keeps circling is GTA 6. Rockstar is supposedly shipping Grand Theft Auto 6 on Series S later this year. If any game could force Microsoft to quietly retire the parity requirement, it's that one. But if Rockstar does ship on Series S without incident, it'll be because Rockstar had the budget and timeline to make it work. Most studios don't. Moon Studios certainly doesn't, and Mahler isn't pretending otherwise. No Rest for the Wicked will eventually come to Xbox, but it's arriving after PS5, after Steam, and potentially after Switch 2 says something about where the Series S sits in the development priority stack heading into the back half of this generation.