Black Myth: Wukong has officially been announced for Xbox Series X|S.
The official Xbox Twitter account made this announcement:
You are the Destined One. Black Myth: Wukong is coming August 20. Pre-order begins June 18!
As some fans immediately recognized, this marks the one-year anniversary of when Black Myth: Wukong launched on PlayStation 5 and PC. That launch turned out to be the biggest release of 2024, but as we later found out, the overwhelming majority of players were from China on PC.
Within the last year, there was an ongoing controversy on why the game was delayed for Xbox Series X|S. As recently as this January, Game Science’s official statement was issues with optimization on Xbox. Game Science’s director Feng Ji allegedly claimed that this work needed “several years of optimization experience.”
On the other hand, Microsoft stayed firm on this statement:
As we have said before, we’re excited for the launch of Black Myth Wukong on Xbox Series X|S and are working with Game Science to bring the game to our platforms.
We’d prefer not to comment on the deals made by our partners with other platform holders but we can confirm that the delay is not due to Xbox platform limitations that have been raised to us.
The rumor and speculation had been that Sony made a deal with Game Science, but it wasn’t a publishing or exclusivity contract. Instead, they simply got to Game Science and offered support to get the game running on PlayStation 5 first. Apparently, Sony saw that Game Science didn’t have the experience to catch up for the Xbox version, so they didn’t even have to add conditions to their support.
Moving forward to today, it’s certainly strange that the optimization Game Science needed to do that needed “several years of optimization experience” was accomplished in exactly one year. It also happens to be the minimum duration for a hypothetical exclusivity deal. It seems that this situation will simply end with a cloud of plausibly deniability that will never be lifted, unless someone who knows the real situation will finally speak out. At least, we hope that Game Science really will have prepared a fully optimized version of the game for Xbox Series X|S players.
In any case, if you still haven’t played Black Myth: Wukong, now is a great time to pick it up. Game Science announced a summer discount for all platforms with these dates:
- PlayStation™Store: June 18 – July 3
- Microsoft Store (Pre-order Discount): June 18 – July 11
- PC (Steam & Epic Games Store): June 20 – July 11
