I still remember the exact moment my Xbox friends stopped asking “when?” and started asking “why?”. As a player who floats between PlayStation and Xbox, I felt like a tennis ball in a match where both players were using different rulebooks. Black Myth: Wukong had detonated across PC and PlayStation like a firework made of myth and muscle, but on Xbox it remained a silhouette—a promised boss fight that never loaded.
Then Game Science CEO Feng Ji took to Weibo and lit a match under the whole conversation. His words were translated on ResetEra, and they struck me like a tuning fork pressed to a cracked glass table. He said: “But that 10G shared memory, I can’t really get it without a few years of optimisation experience.”
For a player like me, that sentence was a pebble dropped into still water. The ripples hit both shores: Xbox fans felt vindicated that the Series S was the bottleneck, while others wondered if we were hearing a developer’s honest postmortem or an excuse polished until it gleamed. The Series S’s 10GB shared memory became the stone in the shoe of every porting conversation I had that month.
Microsoft’s Cleaner Counter-Narrative
Microsoft had already drawn a different map. In September 2024, the company said the delay was not due to “platform limitations.” That phrase sat in my mind like a drop of oil on water—it refused to blend with Feng Ji’s technical lament. Microsoft’s full statement was careful: “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.”
Reading that felt like trying to fold a fitted sheet in the dark: possible, but nobody looks graceful doing it. One side pointed at memory ceilings; the other pointed away from its own hardware. Meanwhile, the rumour mill coughed up another possible culprit: an undisclosed exclusivity deal with PlayStation.
| Who | What they said | My player-brain translation |
|---|---|---|
| Feng Ji / Game Science | Xbox Series S 10G shared memory is the blocker | ‘The pot is real, and it’s too small.’ |
| Microsoft | Delay is not due to platform limitations | ‘Look over there, not at our box.’ |
| Rumour mill | Undisclosed PlayStation exclusivity deal | ‘There’s always a third key under the mat.’ |
Eurogamer reached out to both Xbox and Game Science for clarification, and I remember refreshing my phone like a gambler waiting for a wheel to stop. No clean answer arrived. That silence felt louder than the original contradiction.
Records, Awards, and a Bitter Aftertaste
None of this took away from what Black Myth: Wukong achieved. It broke records by becoming the most popular single-player game by peak concurrent users in Steam history. It also became the most-viewed game on Chinese live-streaming platforms on its first day. As a fan, I watched those numbers climb like ivy up a brick wall—unstoppable and strangely beautiful.
Then came the 2024 Game Awards nomination, and the loss to Astro Bot. Game Science’s CEO posted a lengthy statement saying he felt like he “came all the way here for nothing!” That line hit me in the chest. Here was a studio that had conquered Steam charts and Chinese streaming, yet still stood empty-handed in front of the industry’s biggest stage.
What I Tell My Xbox Friends in 2026
As I write this in early 2026, I still get messages from my Xbox friends asking if the full story ever came out. I tell them the truth: the memory of that contradiction still lingers like smoke in a closed room. I don’t know every contract signed behind closed doors, but I do know that the gap between “10G shared memory” and “not a platform limitation” was never fully bridged in public.
If there is a lesson for us ordinary players, it is this: when a game becomes a phenomenon, the technical truth and the corporate truth often travel in opposite directions. 🎮🔥