Big Walk released on PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2 in August and has gone on to become one of the year’s most critically acclaimed games. The four-player co-operative puzzle game comes from Australian developer House House, which previously received huge success with its breakout debut Untitled Goose Game. While the studio has remained silent as to why the game has not released on Xbox until now, it released a statement today to reveal that there are no plans to bring Big Walk to Xbox as Microsoft’s gaming unit is a target of the BDS boycott movement.
Big Walk was originally announced during The Game Awards 2023. Originally conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, the game follows four players in online only co-op as they traverse an island and solve puzzles together. The game was included as part of PlayStation Plus Essential on PS5 at launch, but has gone on to sell over 2 million copies since its release on August 4.
No XBOX Release
Given the game’s success, fans were left wondering why an Xbox release had yet to be announced by developer House House or publisher Panic. In a post released on social media today, House House revealed that it decided against launching the game on Xbox in solidarity with the Palestinian led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or ‘BDS’.
In April 2025, BDS organizers announced Xbox as a primary target for its boycott campaign, naming parent company Microsoft “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza”. As House House indicates in its statement, it directly named Microsoft’s gaming division Xbox as a pressure point for the company, calling on supporters to engage by boycotting games such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush, and cancelling Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.
House House includes multiple references to information regarding the BDS movement in the post on its website and concludes its statement “We’ve made this decision with the belief that meaningful change can be made in the world, that coordinated collective action can confront even the most powerful interests, and that one day, Palestine will be free.”
Big Walk is available now for PC, PS5, and Switch 2.
