“For those who’re asking, yes we delisted Celeste and TowerFall on XBox. We did this to support the BDS boycott.” With two sentences on Bluesky, developer Maddy Thorson confirmed what Xbox players had begun noticing on 29 October: two of the most beloved indie games of the past decade had quietly vanished from the Microsoft store.
The disappearance caught fans by surprise. Celeste and TowerFall were simply no longer available to purchase on Xbox, while their listings on PlayStation, PC and Nintendo platforms remained untouched. Thorson — the creator behind both games — chose to explain rather than let the speculation run, tying the delisting directly to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement’s campaign against Microsoft.
“For those who’re asking, yes we delisted Celeste and TowerFall on XBox. We did this to support the BDS boycott.” — Maddy Thorson, Bluesky
Why Is the BDS Movement Boycotting Microsoft?
BDS describes itself as a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality, modelled on the campaigns against apartheid-era South Africa. It placed Microsoft — and specifically Microsoft Games and Xbox — on its list of priority boycott targets last year, alleging that the company provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services. Microsoft has confirmed it provided such software; the movement says the company remains a target because it continues to supply email, file management and other services used in what BDS calls “combat and intelligence activities”.
The boycott asks supporters to avoid Microsoft products wherever possible, naming Xbox titles under the wider Microsoft umbrella — Minecraft, Call of Duty and Candy Crush among them — and urging players to cancel Xbox Game Pass subscriptions and boycott both the console and the PC app. Other companies targeted by the movement include HP, Disney, Intel, Dell and Reebok. IGN has asked Microsoft for comment on the Celeste delisting.
Key point: Both games remain on sale everywhere else — PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and non-Microsoft PC storefronts. Celeste is still one of the best-rated games on Steam.
A Growing List of Xbox Absentees
Thorson is not alone. Earlier this autumn, House House — the Australian studio behind the co-op adventure Big Walk — announced it would skip Xbox entirely, citing BDS’s designation of Microsoft Games as a priority target. “If you need help understanding our motives, we would recommend reading about why Microsoft is a BDS priority target,” the studio wrote, adding that Big Walk would come to Xbox should Microsoft divest and come off the boycott list. Rock Paper Shotgun has also reported similar moves by Origame Digital.
The pattern is part of a broader pushback within the industry, much of it organised around No Games for Genocide, a group of developers and games workers campaigning against Microsoft’s military ties. What began as petitions and open letters has now produced concrete commercial consequences: catalogues shrinking, launches skipping a platform, and studios publicly choosing sides.
What Players Lose — and What Remains
For Xbox owners who have not yet bought either game, the door has closed. TowerFall: Ascension, released in 2013, was hailed by Polygon as “the new gold standard in the local multiplayer renaissance” — a single-screen archery brawler that defined a generation of couch play. Celeste, which followed in 2018, became one of the most acclaimed 2D platformers ever made, praised as much for its razor-sharp precision gameplay as for its candid story about anxiety and depression. It picked up multiple game-of-the-year nominations and sold millions across every platform it touched.
It is worth understanding what delisting does and does not mean. Players who already own either title keep their copies and can redownload them; delisting removes a game from sale, not from libraries. What stings is the signal: two catalogue staples, the kind of games that quietly anchor a console’s indie credibility, have been withdrawn on principle rather than for licensing or music-rights reasons — the usual suspects behind most store removals.
Existing owners keep their libraries, and nothing suggests the games are leaving other platforms. But a delisting of this profile sends a message far beyond two indie classics: for the first time, a major boycott campaign is visibly reshaping what sits on the Xbox store.
Microsoft has not commented, and Thorson has not signalled whether the delisting is permanent or conditional, as House House’s was. For now, Celeste’s mountain stands on every platform except one — and the boycott that put it there is only gathering pace.
