Since its release earlier this year, where it achieved massive sales success (over 20 million units) and won Steam’s Game of the Year, there’s only one thing missing from Black Myth. Reign of the Wukong – Where the hell is the Xbox version? Well, it looks like the Xbox Series S is to blame.
Black Myth: Wukong was originally announced to be released on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox. However, the Xbox version was delayed with the developer providing little explanation other than that more optimization was needed.
People are starting to speculate that the Series S could be in trouble due to the weaker console’s difficulties running games. This theory has been supported by other sources, who claim that the Xbox version suffers from a memory leak issue. This will be a huge blow to the Series S since cheaper consoles have less RAM available.
Then the story got wilder when word began to spread about a secret exclusive deal with Sony. Microsoft hasn’t helped by repeatedly making vague statements about not discussing deals from other companies, which has led people to speculate that Microsoft is acknowledging exclusive deals without saying it outright.
But now it looks like the Xbox Series S is really the problem.
As spotted by Reddit user Fidler_2, the game’s creative director posted on Chinese social media platform Weibo to discuss Wukong winning the Steam Game of the Year award. In the post, he briefly touched on the “missing” Xbox version of the game, saying the console’s “10GB of shared memory” was an obstacle he couldn’t overcome “without years of optimization experience.”
Here is his exact post: Please keep in mind that this is a machine translation and may not be completely accurate. I’ve included two versions. One is Google Translate and the other is ChatGPT.
Google Translate: “There were no big surprises, but it was still a bit emotional after winning it all. Everyone’s combat power is so scary, but the only thing lacking is the XBOX robe… This seems a bit wrong. (By the way, that 10G shared memory is really difficult to obtain without several years of optimization experience.”
ChatGPT: “No big surprises, but I still felt a little sentimental after getting everything. Except for the lost Xbox cape, everyone’s combat power is truly scary… It probably shouldn’t (but that 10GB of shared memory is really hard to break without years of optimization experience.)
We will try to confirm this with Chinese speakers if possible and will update this article when it becomes available.
Personally I think this is very likely true and fits perfectly with the memory leak problem. My experience with the PS5 was that if I ran a game for too long, it started to have performance issues, resulting in memory leaks in the game, and only a complete restart of the console fixed the problem. Other people have reported the same problem. The smaller the memory capacity of the Series S, the more vulnerable it is.
And it’s not like the Series S hasn’t had its share of problems in the past. The former Rockstar and Naughty dog designer wished the Series S never existed, describing it as “a pain to optimize”. Baldur’s Gate 3 was significantly delayed because the developers couldn’t make split-screen work on cheaper systems, and Microsoft eventually allowed the game to be published without split-screen on the Series S.
But as big as Black Myth: Wukong is, Microsoft doesn’t seem to want to give in on the issue. This is because Baldur’s Gate 3 was released without feature parity, but on both systems following Microsoft’s rules. Allowing Wukong to only release on Series X would be a huge compromise, and other developers will likely want the same deal. Currently, Microsoft doesn’t seem willing to take risks.
At least there is some potentially good news. The director didn’t say that the game has been canceled or won’t come out on Xbox, so there’s still hope that they can figure out the issue and allow Xbox owners to enjoy Black Myth: Wukong.
