No Rest for the Wicked director and Ori studio founder says you can "kick me in the balls" if you ever find a battle pass or microtransactions in a Moon Studios game "as a reminder to not join the dark side"

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No Rest for the Wicked director Thomas Mahler says you can kick him in the nuts if you ever find microtransactions in one of his games.

Mahler, who co-founded Ori developer Moon Studios with Gennadiy Korol in 2010, took to Twitter in his trademark firebrand style to put his own health and safety on the line in the name of anti-greed.

"If we ever put a MTX Battle Pass or Microtransactions into one of our games, feel free to walk up to me and kick me in the balls as a reminder to not join the dark side," said Mahler. "I strongly feel that quality will always win out in the end because people aren't stupid."

Microtransactions and battle passes are no longer the biggest boogeyman in the games industry with AI becoming an increasing threat to everything we hold dear about art in general, but they're still pretty crappy things to add to your video game. Mahler reckons it all comes down to greed, which it probably does.

"The relationship between developers and players always has to be a fair one that tilts in favor of players because players ultimately decide if we get to keep going or not," added Mahler. "The developer is the servant and ultimately has the final say, but developers ought to always keep in mind that they're serving the people, not themselves.

"We will always work hard to provide insane value at a reasonable price and in turn you folks get something of extremely high quality and continue to salivate towards what we're doing next. And that's how it should be."

Naturally, freemium-style monetization is much more common in live-service and multiplayer games, but it's found a way to creep into single-player experiences too, usually in the unique items or upgrades. Thankfully, Mahler has made it pretty darn clear you won't see any of that garbage in a Moon Studios game, at least as long as he's in charge.

"Any developer who still sells horse armor or allows their game design to get corrupted in order to nickel and dime people on the backend clearly didn't get the memo. Times have changed.

"Greed isn't good. And Gordon Gekko went to jail in the end," Mahler said, referring to the greedy bastard from the movie Wall Street who indeed went to jail at the end.

No Rest for the Wicked launched into Steam Early Access in 2024, and a 1.0 update is planned for release on PC, Xbox Series X, and PS5 at an unknown date.

No Rest for the Wicked lead wants to "repeat" the success Baldur's Gate 3 had launching out of Early Access, but hopes to "keep growing" like Minecraft or Fortnite after that "for years to come."