Black Myth Wukong Xbox delay due to Series S! May never get released..

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2025/01/black-myth-wukong-game-director-confirms-there-was-no-secret-ps5-exclusivity-deal

One of the stupidest stories of 2024 has been cleared up just a couple of days into the New Year, signalling there may finally be better days ahead of us.

Sony was, bizarrely, accused of moneyhatting Chinese gigahit Black Myth: Wukong for its console, after its Xbox release mysteriously vanished before launch. Game Science, the developer, said it was having issues getting the game to run on Microsoft’s machine, but that didn’t stop a spate of stories from accusing PlayStation of purchasing timed exclusivity.

The problem is, the Japanese giant barely marketed the title, and certainly didn’t treat it like other timed exclusives in its portfolio.

Now, in a post on Weibo, game director Feng Ji has confirmed there is no PlayStation exclusivity in place.

“The only thing missing is the Xbox,” he wrote in an otherwise celebratory post, as translated by Google. “Which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory – without years of optimisation experience – is really hard to make work.”

Xbox Series S, the lower-priced console in Microsoft’s next-gen gaming family, has 10GB of GDDR6 RAM which is shared between the CPU and GPU. While most games release fine on the lower-powered hardware, this has caused headaches for other developers, most notably Larian and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Xbox mandates that all games must run on both of its hardware models, and around half of its current install base owns the cheaper Xbox Series S. Therefore, it’s not currently an option to skip the lower-powered model and just release on Xbox Series X.

That would explain why Black Myth: Wukong remains a PS5 console exclusive, even without Sony’s interference or investment. It’s a real headache for Microsoft, and it remains to be seen whether the Game of the Year candidate will ever release on Xbox.

As we always steadfastly argued, however, this never felt like a moneyhat; Sony promotes its timed exclusives differently to what it did with Black Myth: Wukong, which was undoubtedly an important title in its portfolio, but not one it appears it actively prevented from deploying on Xbox.

Thoughts, SW? Should Xbox avoid these parity clauses next time? Better yet, avoid a “Series S” type console ? Now Xbox fans will miss out on the “true” 2024 GOTY!

As a Series X owner, missing out on games because MS wants them to work on much worse hardware would be annoying. I don't give a shit about "parity". No one who owns an X cares about that, only MS does. Luckily, I'm a PC gamer and don't have to care about crappy ecosystems from crappy companies.

Lems will just say Larian is lying. Again. That was their defense a few months ago.

Folks on Twitter are like, “it runs on the Steam Deck” not realizing the Steam Deck has way more RAM than the Series S. The Switch 2 is going to have more RAM than the Series S.

Who would have known 10gb shared memory is laughable, sure you can make it work but it requires a lot of extra work from devs

Nuff Said!! lol :P

Of course we know this is all BS. It comes down to Sony moneyhatting.

Yikes 😬

That's too bad. We'll, Xbox gamers will just play it on the next console since everything seemingly comes out on everything at some point. Exclusive seems to be a retired word for the most part.

Naw my dudes. It was double confirmed as a Sony exclusivity deal.

Microsoft said:

"we can confirm that the delay is not due to Xbox platform limitations that have been raised to us."

@texasgoldrush: Please tell us why the developers should apologize immediately for being complete liars about Xbox platform limitations on known on the Weibo social media network where apparently people are now known to post blatant lies.

Where does it Say that Sony confirmed the exclusivity? And why would the developer make this up?

@SolidGame_basic: Well for one thing IGN confirmed it.

Sony announced console exclusivity for FF16, FF7, Stellar Blade, I find it weird that they would hide it just for this game lol.

I’m all for MS being budget conscious but they should of skipped the Series S and just pushed the Series X headstrong about it. I understand MS doesn't want to leave no one behind but sadly, MS kinda shot themselves in the foot with that logic. Should've let developers release "Series X versions only" when Series S just isn't possible. It's as if MS is treating Series X owners second rate. I'm sure MS won't do that again for their next-gen console.

From what I understand, @texasgoldrush says there is a conspiracy against this game to bury it and make it unsuccessful. Maybe Sony is part of it. I'm sure SW will help us figure everything out.

Right now IGN is claiming the developers lack required experience:

"that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work."

And also lied about Microsoft having Series S requirements:

“many developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped”

How long is the Sony exclusivity deal with Black Myth Wukong?

wowza, this is a bombshell revelation, we'll have to see what texas says about it

0 days

Yep! This one game not running on the Series S means MS should abandon the platform.🧐 Developer issue,not a hardware issue.

Hmm not sure what to think. Series S is the most popular Xbox.

@girlusocrazy: Anyone claiming MS should abandon the S is not particularly smart. MS does a lot of dumb shit but that would be the absolute dumbest.

Or release the console with the same amount of RAM, even if it was slower.

All 99% of current games can run on ROG Ally so it definitely could use 16GB of RAM

Man that really sucks that the Series S is the reason why Xboners can't play Wukong.

Yea, and everyone here is saying Wukong is the true GOTY, so it's doubly bad for them

Release BMW on Series X only and for the Series S, play it through xCloud on it?

I guess MS could just use xCloud on the Series S.

Must be over 100 according to MS.

@davillain: I'm pretty sure xCloud is on Series S hardware. Games run at Series S settings and still 1080p only. If it can't run on Series S maybe it can't run on the cloud.

Phil is to blame, making a console that weak as 💩 that holds back your premium console is dumb af.

As an X owner I couldn't give a 💩 if a game doesn't work on S, I paid the extra for a reason, but Phil is ripping me off by demanding parity with the S.

On a side note only 2 devs have had to push their games back, so maybe they also need better tech guys working for them, either way a screwed-up situation all round.

#firephilalready

XCloud uses Series X hardware at their data centers. It’s been that way for years now. It’s limited in resolution because of the meh streaming tech XCloud uses.

I would not speak out of line against Phil, he could tell Satya to hack your Windows phone..

@SolidGame_basic: Can you get any cringier? Oh that's right you can because you buy gaming dolls disguised as "figurines" 🤣🤣🤣

See leave the trolling to others who actually know what they're doing.

^ got 'em!

It’s both sides Sony is holding an exclusive 3rd party Deal but Ms was also stupid for making the series s this underpowered I mean for crying out loud loud it’s less powerful than an Xbox 1 x

@SolidGame_basic: No what you got was rekt 🤣🤣🤣

DF tested it recently, games run at Series S settings, so I guess they nerfed the cloud hardware. Maybe they would unlock it for Wukong?

We all know that MANY games now were just not going to happen because Sony said so.

Awesome! **** Xbox

Damn, it did not occur to me it only has 10GB of shared memory, for the most part I find it an excellent system for playing Xbox, first party titles typically.

My RTX 3060 has more vRAM than that for crying out loud. (12GB variant)

And 2GB of that RAM only runs at 56 gb/s. 1/4 of the speed of the other 8GB. So it’s likely only used for OS tasks.

Yep. Sony moneyhatted MS to make a low spec shitty console so devs can skip out on Xbox development. You figured it out

Explains why other AAA games figured it out. Sorry for the burn 🔥

Well, they say it's hard to optimize, but you never know.

What if they covered a third of the screen with black bars, ran it at 600p/20-30fps, cut out all the intense action combat and made it a 6 hour walking sim with a crying monkey? Oh wait...

MS might be able to help them. I doubt this whole thing has anything to do with the Series S’s lack of power though. This is the devs first console game ever so it would have been difficult for them to develop a game for multiple consoles at the same time.

Well Devs a4e struggling to get the more powerful series X and ps5 pro version of games looking any or much better than the ps5 so it's either Devs or the ps5 pro and series x are shit

You decide your narrative

This game is too hard for Series S.

Don't worry, it's too hard for me as well.

Weird cuz last gen games never needed that while looking like this:

I'm pretty over these deliberate subpar consoles dragging everything else down with it

The Xbos Series Shit monster strikes again!

I think it is time for MS to bring in The Witcher to slay this monster!

At this point, whether there's an Xbox version or not doesn't matter to them.

@SolidGame_basic: That's not exactly what he said. And, MS execs followed this up with "There is no technical limitation we are aware of".

There's something going on there more than a 10g memory limitation.

@R4gn4r0k said:

@st_monica said:

Well, they say it's hard to optimize, but you never know.

What if they covered a third of the screen with black bars, ran it at 600p/20-30fps, cut out all the intense action combat and made it a 6 hour walking sim with a crying monkey? Oh wait...

Weird cuz last gen games never needed that while looking like this:

It is what they call “CREATIVE DECISIONS”!

Jokes aside, BMW is a current-gen AAA game that requires much more in terms of graphics and performance than these last-gen AAA games.

Optimizing it for the S, which has less RAM (10GB) than even the last-gen Xbox One X released in 2017 (12GB), for example, might require some technical wizardry that GameScience doesn't currently have. If not impossible for other major developers like RockStar, which still plans to release GTA6 for the S (very curious to see how disastrous it will look and run, haha).