Black Myth: Wukong Game Director Confirms There Was No Secret PS5 Exclusivity Deal 1

One of the stupidest stories of 2024 has been cleared up just a couple of days into the New Year, signalling there may finally be better days ahead of us.

Sony was, bizarrely, accused of moneyhatting Chinese gigahit Black Myth: Wukong for its console, after its Xbox release mysteriously vanished before launch. Game Science, the developer, said it was having issues getting the game to run on Microsoft’s machine, but that didn’t stop a spate of stories from accusing PlayStation of purchasing timed exclusivity.

The problem is, the Japanese giant barely marketed the title, and certainly didn’t treat it like other timed exclusives in its portfolio.

Now, in a post on Weibo, game director Feng Ji has confirmed there is no PlayStation exclusivity in place.

“The only thing missing is the Xbox,” he wrote in an otherwise celebratory post, as translated by Google. “Which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory – without years of optimisation experience – is really hard to make work.”

Xbox Series S, the lower-priced console in Microsoft’s next-gen gaming family, has 10GB of GDDR6 RAM which is shared between the CPU and GPU. While most games release fine on the lower-powered hardware, this has caused headaches for other developers, most notably Larian and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Xbox mandates that all games must run on both of its hardware models, and around half of its current install base owns the cheaper Xbox Series S. Therefore, it’s not currently an option to skip the lower-powered model and just release on Xbox Series X.

That would explain why Black Myth: Wukong remains a PS5 console exclusive, even without Sony’s interference or investment. It’s a real headache for Microsoft, and it remains to be seen whether the Game of the Year candidate will ever release on Xbox.

As we always steadfastly argued, however, this never felt like a moneyhat; Sony promotes its timed exclusives differently to what it did with Black Myth: Wukong, which was undoubtedly an important title in its portfolio, but not one it appears it actively prevented from deploying on Xbox.

[source m.weibo.cn, via thegamepost.com]