Since launching earlier this year and becoming a massive sales success (20+ million and counting) and then winning Steam’s Game of the Year, only one thing has been missing from Black Myth: Wukong‘s reign – where the hell is the Xbox version? Well, it looks like the Xbox Series S is to blame.
Black Myth: Wukong was originally announced as coming to PlayStation, PC and Xbox. The Xbox version was, however, delayed with the developer offering very little explanation outside of needing more optimisation.
People began to speculate that the Series S might be the issue due the weaker console struggle to run the game. This theory was supported by other sources claiming that the Xbox version was suffering from a memory leak issue. This would hit the Series S hard as the cheaper console has less RAM available.
Then the story got wilder as stories began spreading about a secretive exclusivity deal with Sony. Microsoft did not help as it kept repeating a vague statement about not discussing other companies deals, resulting in people speculating that Microsoft was admitting to the exclusivity deal without outright saying it.
But now it seems like the Xbox Series S really is the issue.
As spotted by Reddit user Fidler_2:, the game’s creative director posted on Chinese social media platform Weibo, discussing Wukong’s winning of Steam’s Game of the Year. In the post, the briefly touched upon the “missing” Xbox version of the game, saying that consoles “10GB of shared memory” was a hurdle they could not overcome “without a few years of optimization experience.”
His exact post is below. Please do keep in mind that these are machine translations and may not be wholly accurate. I’ve included two versions: one from Google Translate, and the second from ChatGPT:
Google Translate: “Although there were no big surprises, I still felt a little emotional after winning all of them. Everyone’s fighting power is so terrifying, but the only thing missing is the XBOX robe… It seems a bit wrong (but that 10G shared memory, it is really impossible to get it without a few years of optimization experience.”
ChatGPT: “Although there were no major surprises, I still felt a bit sentimental after securing everything. Everyone’s combat power is truly terrifying, except for the missing Xbox cloak… It seems like it shouldn’t be (but that 10GB of shared memory, without years of optimization experience, it’s really hard to bring it down.”
I will attempt to confirm these with Chinese speakers if possible, and will update this article should I manage it.
Personally, I think this is likely very true, and fits perfectly with the memory leak issue. In my own experience on PS5, the game does suffer from a memory leak as performance problems began occurring if I left the game running for too long, and only a full restart of the console would solve it. Other people reported the same problem. The smaller memory capacity of the Series S would make it more susceptible.
And it’s not like the Series S hasn’t caused issues in the past. A former Rockstar and Naughty dog designer wished the Series S didn’t exist, describing it as “annoying to optimise” for. Baldur’s Gate 3 was heavily delayed because the developers couldn’t get split-screen working on the cheaper machine, eventually causing Microsoft to let them publish the game minus split-screen on the Series S.
However, as big as Black Myth: Wukong is, it seems Microsoft doesn’t want to cede ground on this issue. That’s because Baldur’s Gate 3 launched without feature-parity but otherwise did come out on both machines as per Microsoft’s rules. If they allowed Wukong to release on Series X only, it would be a huge compromise and other developers would want the same deal. At the moment, Microsoft does not appear willing to risk it.
There is at least some potential good new: the director did not say the game was cancelled on Xbox or not coming out, so there’s still some hope they can figure the issue out and let Xbox owners enjoy Black Myth: Wukong.