DayZ creator’s survival game Icarus is coming to PS5 and Xbox soon, but it won’t have cross-play

Icarus, the survival game made by Dean Hall of DayZ fame, is coming to console. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions of the game will be released in Q1 2026, and a trailer for the ports was aired during the Galaxies showcase today.

The console ports are being handled by a separate team to Hall’s RocketWerkz studio in New Zealand. They’re being developed by Grip Studios in the Czech Republic, which helped make games like Mafia: The Old Country, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Conan Exiles and more in the past.

Icarus, a PvE survival crafting game for up to eight players, was released four years ago on PC and got off to a rocky start. But three expansions and many content updates later, it’s in better shape. The console ports arriving later in the game’s lifecycle means Grip has the benefit of cherry picking the best additions, and notably, the console version will include the New Frontiers expansion released in 2023.

There won’t be cross-play, though, because the two versions of the game, PC and console, are different and therefore incompatible. Hall explained this to me in a separate interview which I’ve written into a bigger piece to be published tomorrow.

Hall said: “Instead of holding PC development back because of console, and holding console development back because of PC – personally that bothers me intensely as a consumer; I really, really, really don’t like that… I wanted the console version to be the best console version that could be, and I wanted the PC version to be the best version it could be, and that means there are some content differences and some of the content on the console was packed differently.”

Cross-play incompatibility “was unfortunately one of those casualties” caused by this.

One of the upsides of console development, however, has been proper controller support for everyone, finally.