No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios is now 'fully independent' after acquiring the rights to the game from Take-Two

The fallout from Take-Two Interactive's selloff of its Private Division publishing label continued today as Moon Studios announced that it has acquired the rights to its latest game, No Rest for the Wicked, and is now "fully independent."

It all stretches back to May 2024, when reports that Take-Two was looking to sell or close Private Division first came to light. Take-Two confirmed that it had indeed offloaded Private Division to an unnamed buyer—later revealed to be private equity firm Haveli Investments, who signed up former Annapurna Interactive employees to run the show—in November 2024.

The sale included "substantially all of Private Division’s live and unreleased" games, with one notable exception: No Rest for the Wicked, which Take-Two said it would continue to support.

Fast-forward to now, and all that has changed. "Our publisher for No Rest for the Wicked was Private Division, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive," Moon Studios' Thomas Mahler and Gennadiy Korol explain in a developer video posted today. "Take-Two decided to sell off Private Division, which was unexpected news for us.

"After some deliberation, we saw an opportunity. After months of negotiations, we reached an agreement to buy the publishing rights for No Rest for the Wicked back, so that Moon Studios could become fully independent. This legal process took time, and we couldn't say much while it was all happening. But today, we're excited to announce that it's all done and that Moon Studios is now fully independent."

Mahler and Korol said the change should give players "more confidence" in Moon Studios' vision for the game, "because we're free to build No Rest for the Wicked exactly how we want, without needing to ever go silent again."

The first step in that process will be The Breach, which they said is the largest content update ever released for No Rest for the Wicked, set to go live on April 30. The Breach includes "massive" new zones "that essentially double the size of the world," as well as two new weapon archetypes, new enemies, bosses, secrets, and other content. Progression and gear drops have been reworked, a number of quality-of-life changes have been made, and players can now try their luck with "Hardcore Characters," which will suffer permadeath if and when they go down. They won't become inaccessible upon death, though, but will instead be downgraded to non-hardcore characters that can only be played on regular realms.

Somewhat unusually, The Breach won't be accessible as a regular expansion: Existing saves will remain in a "legacy build," and you'll need to replay the game in order to "fully experience this update."

"This approach ensures The Breach is integrated as seamlessly as possible into the game," Mahler says in the video. "We realize this might be a surprise for some. Ultimately, the scope of The Breach and the underlying changes led us here."

It sounds like a major overhaul to No Rest for the Wicked, and frankly it probably needs one. Concurrent player counts have tailed off precipitously since its early access launch in April 2024, from a high of more than 36,000 to just a few hundred at any given time over the past six months.

Those player numbers may have helped prompt Take-Two to unload the game—CEO Strauss Zelnick said when he confirmed the sale of Private Division that its games "were not big in the context of our core intellectual properties at 2K and Rockstar," and were thus not something the company was particularly interested in pursuing—but why it opted to hold onto No Rest for the Wicked in the first place is unclear.

In any event, Moon Studios plans to "heavily support" The Breach in the weeks following its release, with more content drops and an update for co-op play, which had originally been planned for release before The Breach: Korol said Moon Studios opted to roll out The Breach first to give players more content to play through once co-op goes live.