Celeste and TowerFall Vanish From the Xbox Store as Maddy Thorson Cites the BDS Boycott of Microsoft
By CriticalPixel ·
Two of the most loved indie games of the last decade just disappeared from a major storefront, and it was not a licensing mess or a publisher dispute. Celeste and TowerFall have been delisted from the Xbox digital store, and director Maddy Thorson says it was on purpose. In a post on Bluesky, Thorson wrote: "For those who're asking, yes, we delisted Celeste and TowerFall on Xbox. We did this to support the BDS boycott." That quote was reported by PC Gamer on October 31, and it is the clearest statement we have so far. No Microsoft response has surfaced in the coverage I opened, so treat everything below as the developer's side plus the reporting around it.
What Actually Changed on Xbox
The practical effect is simple. Neither game can be bought on the Xbox store anymore, which cuts Microsoft out of any new sales on those titles. Per a summary circulating from Valhalla Gaming, existing Xbox owners can still access the copies they already paid for, and both games remain on sale on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and PC. Celeste still sits on Steam at its regular listing, and TowerFall does too, which PC Gamer points out directly. So this is a storefront removal on one platform, not a game being killed off. If you own either one on Xbox, nothing about your library should change based on what has been reported so far.
The mechanics of why this matters to Microsoft are not mysterious. As PC Gamer lays out, console makers usually sell hardware at thin margins and earn it back through their cut of every digital sale on their proprietary store. A critically acclaimed pair like Celeste and TowerFall keeps trickling in sales years after launch, which is easy money for the platform holder. Pulling them stops that trickle. It is a small number in a company the size of Microsoft, but small numbers are the whole point of a boycott aimed at a storefront rather than at a studio.
Not the First Developer to Make This Move
PC Gamer frames the delisting as part of a pattern. Earlier this month, House House, the studio behind the co-op puzzle adventure Big Walk, explained why that game is not coming to Xbox. The reasoning was that Microsoft's gaming division is a named target of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, which stands for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions and lists the tech giant alongside companies like Google and Amazon. The Big Walk team went further and said it likely never will release on Xbox, not until Microsoft and Xbox are removed as BDS boycott targets. Celeste and TowerFall differ in one important way: they were already on the platform, so this is a withdrawal rather than a decision to skip it.
That difference matters for players. Declining to launch somewhere costs the developer potential revenue and costs players nothing they already had. Delisting an existing game takes a title away from a store where people might have bought it next week. Thorson's team accepted that tradeoff, and the reporting suggests the people who already bought the games are protected from the fallout. It is a clean version of a protest: the cost lands mostly on the developers themselves.
How the Community Is Reading It
Reaction so far is limited and mostly comes from news aggregator accounts relaying the story, not from a broad sample of players. The posts I saw were either neutral recaps or openly supportive of the developer, and that is a thin base for claiming any consensus. Expect the argument to get louder as the weekend goes on, because anything that mixes game stores with geopolitics tends to split a comment section fast. Some Xbox players will see a beloved game stripped from their platform of choice. Others will read it as a developer using the only leverage they have over a storefront. Both takes will be loud, and neither tells us what the audience at large thinks.
The CriticalPixel Take
Whatever you think of the politics, the business logic of this move is hard to wave away. Indie developers rarely have leverage over platform holders, and a storefront cut is one of the few levers a small studio can actually pull on its own. Celeste is a game that still sells steadily, which is what makes the gesture cost something. Thorson did not announce this with a trailer or a press release. A short Bluesky reply to people asking where the games went was enough, and that restraint makes the message land harder than a polished statement would have.
For Xbox, the awkward part is the trend line rather than any single title. One studio skipping the platform is a footnote. A second studio pulling two established games from it starts to look like a movement that platform holders will have to answer at some point. Microsoft has said nothing in the coverage I could find, and silence is a choice too. If you are an Xbox player who wanted to play Celeste or TowerFall, the games are still easy to find on Steam, where Celeste carries a regular price tag, or on PlayStation and Switch. If you care about the boycott, buying elsewhere is exactly what the developers are nudging you toward.
The open questions are worth watching. Will Microsoft comment, and will more studios with games already on the Xbox store follow Thorson and House House? Will the delisting affect future ports or sequels from Maddy Makes Games? None of that is answered yet, and I am not going to guess. What we can say for sure is that a decade-defining platformer and one of the best local multiplayer games ever made are no longer for sale on Xbox, and the person who made them is happy to tell you why.
Sources
PC Gamer: Celeste and TowerFall delisted from Xbox storefronts to support BDS boycott
Valhalla Gaming on X: Maddy Makes Games removes Celeste and TowerFall from Xbox