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"

gamesradar.com:

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