If that’s the reason, it doesn’t paint MS in a good light. Bullying small indie devs out of spite. Especially considering that, after saying that in March, Jyamma spent time and money to release the game on Xbox the same day as the other platforms.
But I honestly doubt it. Corporations are NOT people (even if the law would like to pretend otherwise) and they don’t think the same way as people. They don’t play favourites, they don’t play nice or bully others because they feel like to. They chase money, and that’s it. A game releasing on their platform is literally free money. This is just a fuck up on their part. If I had to guess, MS cut jobs and replaced them with AI and left a skeleton crew working on this.