While we’re in the new year now, that doesn’t mean that stories from the past year won’t creep up into things every now and again. After all, there were a lot of big stories last year, and some of them were about the faults and fallacies of certain developers and publishers that definitely carry over into 2025. Enter Microsoft, which had plenty of issues last year, including the shutdown of certain companies, key games not being as big as it hoped, and not getting games like Black Myth Wukong at launch. Fast forward to now, and we can finally say why that is.
You see, it was a big deal when Black Myth Wukong didn’t come to Xbox outright, especially when it blew up in sales and got over 20 million units sold in a single month. That meant that all of that was on the PlayStation 5 and PC and that Microsoft missed out on either adding to that or having people buy it instead on the Xbox Series X/S. So, what was the deal with this?
On Weibo, which is a Chinese social media site if you didn’t know, the game’s director revealed that it had to do with the various specifications of the Xbox Series X/S that held up developer GameScience. Specifically, it was one about “10G of shared memory.” According to director Feng Ji, “It’s really impossible to get it without several years of optimization experience.”
If you do not understand what’s happening here, one of the key factors in bringing a game to this generation of Xbox platforms is that you have to put it both on the X AND S. You can’t just pick one of them and make the game for that. That’s been frustrating to many game developers, and if you’re having Déjà vu, you might recall that a certain “Game of the Year” from 2023 had that issue. Yes, a certain RPG from Larian Studios also had a serious delay on Xbox because of the requirements that Microsoft forced on them. Sure, it eventually got to the platform, but it took several months after launch, and it’s taking the GameScience crew a lot longer than Larian because Wukong’s game was the team’s first title! Thus, they don’t have the know-how per se to make things work instantly.
That’s sadly another failure on Microsoft, who bragged before the release of its systems that the Xbox generation would dominate, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.
