Black Myth: Wukong launching on Xbox Series X in 2025?

Black Myth: Wukong was released on PlayStation 5 and Steam on August 20, 2024, while the release date for Xbox Series X|S was supposed to be later. The game immediately became very popular after launch and even won the Players' Voice and Best Action Game awards at The Game Awards 2024, even though Game Science's CEO wasn't happy about Black Myth: Wukong didn't win Game of the Year. Many questions were raised regarding why Black Myth: Wukong wasn't on the Xbox Series X or whether or not an exclusivity arrangement ever existed, and all these answers finally seem to be clear now.

There was much back-and-forth about this, with many insiders suggesting it was due to a secret PlayStation exclusive pact, while others blamed the Xbox Series S and specific constraints. The director of Black Myth: Wukong himself, provided a formal clarification, quoting that due to the Xbox Series S's limited memory capacity of 10 GB, it would not be released on Xbox.

In fact, it was so bad that Microsoft had to admit it. This is the official statement Microsoft issued last year regarding Black Myth: Wukong's lack of availability on Xbox: "We are excited for the launch of Black Myth: Wukong on Xbox series X|S and are working with game science to bring the game to our platforms." They also mentioned that they couldn't comment on the agreements reached by their partners with other platform holders, but they'd remain committed to making Xbox the finest platform for gamers, and fantastic games are at the heart of that goal.

Obviously, Microsoft sent the statement at the height of rumors circulated by alleged insiders about an exclusivity deal, and the director of Black Myth: Wukong had to confirm what many of us suspected: there is no exclusivity deal with PlayStation.

While it's true that Black Myth: Wukong could easily be launched on the Xbox Series X, the game might benefit from extra RAM optimization time; the real problem is that it wasn't developed with the Xbox Series S's restricted RAM pool in mind. Problematically, they have yet to achieve the Xbox Series S hardware envelope by only reducing graphical settings, indicating that the Xbox Series S was certainly not a priority. It would take a lot of effort and resources to get it working on the Xbox Series S.

A lot of Xbox users were upset since they didn't want to miss playing Black Myth: Wukong on their preferred platform. While they were upset that there might be an exclusivity deal, they hammered Sony after knowing there wasn't any exclusivity deal with Game Science. However, now that we know that Game Science is working on a Black Myth: Wukong expansion, we can expect Microsoft to sort out the technical issues and launch the game on Xbox Series X|S in 2025.