Black Myth: Wukong Dev Bemoans Lack of Xbox Version, Points the Finger at Xbox Series S

ign.com:

The boss of Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science has pointed the finger at the Xbox Series S over the lack of an Xbox version of the game.

In a post on Chinese social media website Weibo, Game Science co-founder and CEO Feng Ji celebrated PC and PlayStation 5 action game Black Myth: Wukong’s Game of the Year win at the 2024 Steam awards, and in doing so lamented the lack of an Xbox version of the game, which he blamed on optimization trouble with the Xbox Series S.

“The only thing missing is the Xbox,” he said, per machine learning translation, “which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work.”

That’s a reference to the Xbox Series S’ power relative to the Xbox Series X. The Series S has 4TF of GPU compute compared to the Xbox Series X’s 12.2TF, but the killer is the drop in memory allocation, from 16GB down to 10GB.

Microsoft’s Xbox release policy means publishers and developers must release their games across Xbox Series X and S. They are unable to release a game for Xbox Series X only, for example. This has caused difficulty for some studios in the past, perhaps most notably Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian. Baldur's Gate 3 was originally released on PC and PS5 only, with the Xbox version delayed due to issues with the Xbox Series S specifically struggling to perform splitscreen co-op. In the past, Xbox had committed to parity between Xbox Series S and X for all games, but it ultimately made an exception for Baldur's Gate 3 so the game could launch later in 2023.

In 2023, Remedy communications director Thomas Puha talked openly about the challenge the studio faced getting Alan Wake 2 running well on the Xbox Series S, saying the console’s GPU “is an issue” and “having less memory is a pretty big problem.” Before then, a VFX artist who had worked on an Xbox Series X and S game said in a now-deleted tweet that “many developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year