Black Myth: Wukong lead blames the missing Xbox port on Series S specs, months after Microsoft claimed the delay wasn't due to "platform limitations"

The situation around Black Myth: Wukong's console exclusivity has gotten even stranger as the action blockbuster's lead has said the game isn't on Xbox because of the Xbox Series S' specs.

Black Myth: Wukong lead and Game Science CEO Feng Ji celebrated the game's multiple wins in the player-voted 2024 Steam Awards - where it grabbed gold for Game of the Year - in a post on Chinese social media site Weibo, where he also wagged his finger at Microsoft's more affordable console.

"The only thing missing is the Xbox, which somehow feels a bit wrong," Feng Ji said, per machine learning translation, "but that 10GB of shared memory - without years of optimisation experience - is really hard to make work." He's of course referring to the Xbox Series S' 10GB of shared memory, down from the Xbox Series X's 16GB of memory allocation - a drop that other developers have also called out.

Microsoft policy means that no game can launch on the Series X without also coming out with the same features on the all-digital, smaller, and cheaper Series S. Larian Studios ran into a wall last year when the studio struggled to get Baldur's Gate 3's co-op properly working on the little machine, but Microsoft eventually made an exception for the juggernaut RPG and the game launched on both consoles, without co-op functionality for the Series S.

Dune: Awakening chief product officer Scott Junior bemoaned the console's specs, too, even claiming the Xbox Series S was "one of the reasons we're coming out on PC first" because "there's a lot of optimisations we need to do before we release on the Xbox."

Phil Spencer has continually defended the Xbox Series S and argued that an "entry-level price point for console, sub-$300, is a good thing for the industry" in an interview with Eurogamer. "I think it's important, the Switch has been able to do that, in terms of kind of the traditional plug-into-my-television consoles. I think it's important. So, we're committed." It's also worth noting that high-end games like Hellblade 2 and Indiana Jones do run well on the console, even if their settings aren't maxed out.

But the situation with Black Myth: Wukong gets a little complicated as Microsoft previously issued statements to the press that implied there was an exclusivity agreement in place with PlayStation. "We'd prefer not to comment on the deals made by our partners with other platform holders but we can confirm that the delay is not due to Xbox platform limitations that have been raised to us," last year's statement reads. IGN and Forbes reporters also corroborated the statement with their own sources who claimed there was some kind of exclusivity deal keeping the game off of Xbox consoles.

What's really going on? Who knows! Regardless, the ESRB recently rated an Xbox Series X|S version of Black Myth: Wukong, so a release might not be too far off.