Black Myth Wukong. It’s one of the best selling games of the year, and most of those gamers are transparently coming from China. It’s going to change the way the industry makes games, even if it launched with technical issues on both PlayStation 5 and PC. Some people call it a GOTY contender, in the same year Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came out.
Yesterday, we reported on a rumor that Black Myth Wukong has a memory leak issue on Xbox Series X|S, and so the release on those consoles has been delayed indefinitely. Since then, there’s been a flurry of activity online between people who have different sources telling them different things, but if there’s one thing you need to know, it’s this.
Two news outlets are now independently corroborating that Game Science has an exclusivity deal for Black Myth Wukong on PlayStation 5.
Jez Corden was one of the first to report that he heard rumors about an exclusivity deal, writing for Windows Central. Today, Windows Central reported on Paul Tassi from Forbes, as well as IGN, have each corroborated from their own sources that there is a deal. Both were also told that Sony and Game Science have deliberately chosen not to publicize it, and that rumors that there are tech issues are inaccurate.
Since those reports came out, new people have also chimed in, with their own conflicting accounts. As reported by Tweaktown, Jeff Grubb says that there is no money marketing deal that is keeping the game off of Xbox.
Tweaktwon also reported on ‘Shpeshal’ Nick Baker saying that there was a misunderstanding between Sony and Game Science. According to Nick’s sources, Sony paid in part for Game Science to port the game to PlayStation 5, but they did not mandate any exclusivity.
As we reported on yesterday, there are definitely more details in the Black Myth Wukong deal with Sony that is not that widely known as it is. Dan Ahmad revealed that Sony had a sales promotion involving the game and the PlayStation 5, only in China. Strangely enough, that promotion was such a success that it may have unintentionally led to Xbox consoles selling out in Japan. You can read more about that here.
In any case, fans can believe what they want to believe, but there is no way that there is a Schrodinger’s PlayStation 5 exclusivity deal. Either the exclusivity deal is real, and some insiders are getting fed bad information to muddle the waters, or there is no exclusivity deal.
In which case, maybe Sony got more from Game Science than they were actually asking for, because of some misunderstanding. And they might not have clarified anything, because they were obviously benefitting from it. But if that were the case, isn’t Sony taking advantage of this Chinese developer who is going global for the first time?
We’re not sure that all this hubbub is really proportional to how good Black Myth Wukong is, and more importantly, if it’s good for Game Science. If they’re being taken advantage of by Sony now, who’s to say Sony or some other global company will try to do it again? Is it really fair to paint Game Science this way if they didn’t actually do anything wrong to Xbox gamers? And can they live up to all this hype that their game may not really live up to when they make their next project?
We hope Game Science has people observing all of this, and advising them to speak out on it now, independently. They seem to be getting caught up on console wars between fans, for a game that they decided to bring to both Xbox and PlayStation. That might not be fair, and it really seems to be a distraction from them making their breakout hit a better game. We certainly look forward to the developer speaking for themselves when they finally do it.
