Report: No Rest For The Wicked Lead Spends New Year's Eve Picking A Fight...

Understatement of the year, and we're only five days in.

No Rest for the Wicked is an interesting game—a lovely-looking and, by my colleague's accounts, genuinely promising roguelike. Its biggest obstacle, however, seems to be its project lead and developer CEO Thomas Mahler, who is once again taking to social media to get into fights with people (thanks, Gamesradar+).

The person in question is former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, who left the company late January last year. Both Ybarra and Mahler got into a spat on X during New Years Eve—one which started with Mahler posting the following: "We all know anyone can look good in Diablo 4 or PoE2. Do you really want to show your audience you've got skill? Try No Rest for the Wicked."

Ybarra then proceeded to reply: "Putting down other games for your own games sake doesn't really work. Let your game stand on its own two feet," following it up with a reasonable: "I haven't played in a while, excited to fire it up and check out the progress."

Here is the part where I, a third party trying to muster up the energy to care about this, cry 'objection!' and point out that Ybarra did exactly this December 2024, dunking on Marvel Rivals as an Overwatch clone. In fairness, though, that was over a year ago—and perhaps he's simply learnt his lesson after being visited by the ghosts of tweeters past, present, and future.

But I digress: What follows is an exhausting slapfight between the former head of a company bought for $68 billion, and the CEO of a studio that really needs to log off for a bit. On New Year's Eve 2025, Mahler lashed out: "Diablo used to mean something. Diablo 2 was an utter masterpiece and showed the whole world what western developers could do. You OK'd turning Diablo into a MTX slot machine where people can buy horse armor for $65.

"So should we gamers thank you for that or is a little honest critique deserved here? It's time that executives stop patting themselves on the back after ruining beloved franchises and accept some personal responsibility."

I'm not here to gas up Diablo 4, or whatever—as a matter of fact, I've written about how dumb that horse was before. However, I do want to point out that the horse was priced as, essentially, a tack-on to $65's worth of premium currency. Still annoying? Yes, but not a $65 horse. Anyway, we all know that D4's microtransactions aren't great. Moving on.

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Source: PC Gamer