Black Myth: Wu Kong [PC, Consoles]

Follows pretty closely to what we saw with BG3. Pretty sure Sony paid for early access or early release. There’s no technical challenge here with Series S. It’s not ram limited like BG3 was.
 
At the same time, XB has zero presence in China. I can understand the devs picking just the two primary machines first and then worry about ports. This is their first non-mobile game after all.

We need evidence one way or the other. I'm sure The Internet will wait patiently before reacting and ensure they have all the facts first...



Earlier this week, leaker eXtas1s claimed to have spoken to Xbox developers during Gamescom, and reported the game is "suffering from a bug known as 'memory leak', which can cause significant crashes that could compromise the performance" of Xbox consoles. As a result, eXtas1s said Black Myth: Wukong "has not passed Xbox's bug detection tests and has therefore been indefinitely delayed until they manage to optimise the game for Series X/S".

...

The exclusivity deal has been corroborated by Forbes and IGN sources, though the exact terms of this alleged deal remain unknown. Previous claims of tech issues causing a delay to the Xbox release are
"inaccurate", IGN was told.

The exclusivity agreement was subsequently disputed by journalist Jeff Grubb. Speaking as part of Giant Bomb's Game Mess Decides podcast, Grubb said "Sony has no money marketing deal to keep [Black Myth: Wukong] off of Xbox" consoles, as per his sources.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Follows pretty closely to what we saw with BG3. Pretty sure Sony paid for early access or early release. There’s no technical challenge here with Series S. It’s not ram limited like BG3 was.
Who says it's because of Series S? The first leak was talking about a memory leak and we know it can be genuine because others UE5 games were also impacted on Xbox Series, including X. I remember posting somewhere here about a reddit post of a developer saying they had trouble with memory in their UE5 game on XSX. Another UE5 game had long freezes on both Xbox Series consoles typical with a memory leak that was patched I think only months later.

Everything fits IMO with such a big and ambitious game. And yes like Shifty said, it's a chinese game targeting PC + Playstation. Logical they didn't want the hurdles of another platform to optimize that could have delayed the release of their game, particularly when we suspect this platform has somehow memory troubles in UE5 games.
 
Who says it's because of Series S? The first leak was talking about a memory leak and we know it can be genuine because others UE5 games were also impacted on Xbox Series, including X. I remember posting somewhere here about a reddit post of a developer saying they had trouble with memory in their UE5 game on XSX. Another UE5 game had long freezes on both Xbox Series consoles typical with a memory leak that was patched I think only months later.

Everything fits IMO with such a big and ambitious game. And yes like Shifty said, it's a chinese game targeting PC + Playstation. Logical they didn't want the hurdles of another platform to optimize that could have delayed the release of their game, particularly when we suspect this platform has somehow memory troubles in UE5 games.
The quality of the PS5 release is in question. Mirrors quite similarly to what we saw with the PS5 release version of BG3. It definitely doesn’t show polish.
 
What if, instead of being a secret deal done in the shadows, we listen to what was said by Game Science: they are still optimizing the game on Xbox platforms.


The original source of the rumour, Paul Tassi, isn't even sure what's going on.

What I'm almost certain is happening is that the game wasn't going to release on consoles and PC at the same time, so Sony sent some engineers to make it for launch day.

Meanwhile performance degrades on PS5 and PC when playing for long enough, suggesting a memory leak, so when combined with the 8gb available ram on series s, you can see that the game would be problematic there.
 
What if... And I know this sounds wild and crazy... Xbox's certification has different criteria and therefore rejects the code that may perform the same on Playstation. From my perspective, there is too much evidence that the game isn't in a in a technical state that either caused a rejection for the Xbox platform in general, or Series S in particular, and that it just needs a bit of polish to get it ready to ship. I cannot see why Sony, or any company, would pay for an exclusivity deal that didn't include the right to market the game as an exclusive.
 
What if... And I know this sounds wild and crazy... Xbox's certification has different criteria and therefore rejects the code that may perform the same on Playstation. From my perspective, there is too much evidence that the game isn't in a in a technical state that either caused a rejection for the Xbox platform in general, or Series S in particular, and that it just needs a bit of polish to get it ready to ship. I cannot see why Sony, or any company, would pay for an exclusivity deal that didn't include the right to market the game as an exclusive.
It’s not that. As someone that has had to cert with Sony, I very much doubt cert is holding it all up. If it were it would have been out this week. Platforms don’t cert code. They cert the release file. They play them to ensure that there isn’t anything in there that shouldn’t be there.

I believe that it is scouting for games that are PC based that need to be ported to console and the release date for console is after PC.

If you find a title like that you can pay to move your console release up with PC.

there’s no way to describe this move, but it’s eerily similar to what we saw with BG3. There is no exclusivity contract, that doesn’t mean Sony isn’t dropping cash to move up their own release with PC.

It’s significantly cheaper to do this, you gain the same benefit ultimately as a timed exclusive, while putting you out of crosshairs for politics about leveraging your leadership position to secure exclusives. Its a win win for the developer and Sony.
 
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The quality of the PS5 release is in question. Mirrors quite similarly to what we saw with the PS5 release version of BG3. It definitely doesn’t show polish.
Imagine how worse it would have been on PS5 if they had to put some work on 2 others consoles port, XSS and XSX, while releasing the game on the same day !
 
Imagine how worse it would have been on PS5 if they had to put some work on 2 others consoles port, XSS and XSX, while releasing the game on the same day !
Having a base console with less than the min amount of physical ram for the gen + feature parity is just a recipe for disaster. If they remove the feature parity clause and let the Series S version ship as is is wouldnt drag Series X owners into this. Devs wont have issues making PS5 pro titles because the game is designed around the base PS5 and just spruced up for the pro
 
Follows pretty closely to what we saw with BG3. Pretty sure Sony paid for early access or early release. There’s no technical challenge here with Series S. It’s not ram limited like BG3 was.
Why would Sony pay for early access and not market it like they always do? Even worse Game Science explicitly stated they’re still optimizing the Series version of the game, meaning they had it running in some form. They could have said they had timed exclusivity on PS5. The PS5 version of the game can easily run on the Series X and possibly even perform better. So that leaves only one possibility(Series S issues).

The exclusivity rumours make no sense at all and sound like embelishment from some journalists. Its possible Sony had their engineers help with the PS5 port, doesnt stop MS from doing the same especially considering they have an sku with lower physical memory yet has to match strict console requirements including feature parity with the Series X. Exclusivity deal imho is the most far fetched reason.
 
Imagine how worse it would have been on PS5 if they had to put some work on 2 others consoles port, XSS and XSX, while releasing the game on the same day !
Yea they wouldn’t have. They would have put all their priority into pc. Launch it and dual launch the other consoles after.
 
Anyways, people giving the blame to series s are wrong in this case. Why does this game even have a memory leak in the first place? It's an unreal engine game, I don't remember any other games in this engine with problems like that.
 
I doubt it's Sony money hutting this. It does sound more like a combination of a new inexperienced team focusing where it made sense financially and technically, and Sony offering technical help. Which is an area likely were they did not have such help from MS and not making as much sense anyways to do so. Considering how the game performs on PS5, it sounds reasonable that technical difficulties were exacerbated by having to optimize for the much weaker Series S. It makes perfect sense to target PC and the PS5 that does better and has only one console, and deal with XBox later. The Sony paid timed exclusivity is possibly another mistranslation of Sony being involved to make sure the game hits the PC launch date.

The fact that the memory leakage quote appears to come from a source within XBOX, makes this scenario the more logical
 
Follows pretty closely to what we saw with BG3. Pretty sure Sony paid for early access or early release. There’s no technical challenge here with Series S. It’s not ram limited like BG3 was.
Pretty sure this is incorrect. Larian is on record saying they had issues with the Series S because Microsoft wanted feature parity with the X, but they couldn’t get split-screen to work properly. They ultimately dropped it.
 
I doubt it's Sony money hutting this. It does sound more like a combination of a new inexperienced team focusing where it made sense financially and technically, and Sony offering technical help. Which is an area likely were they did not have such help from MS and not making as much sense anyways to do so. Considering how the game performs on PS5, it sounds reasonable that technical difficulties were exacerbated by having to optimize for the much weaker Series S. It makes perfect sense to target PC and the PS5 that does better and has only one console, and deal with XBox later. The Sony paid timed exclusivity is possibly another mistranslation of Sony being involved to make sure the game hits the PC launch date.

The fact that the memory leakage quote appears to come from a source within XBOX, makes this scenario the more logical
This! its not like the game has been running flawlessly on all platforms(PC,PS5). But having strict console requirements and feature parity for two SKUs makes it harder for a developer thats just transitioned away from Mobile games. You're going to end up with a delay of the game since you cant release the Series X version of the game without releasing the S version. Unless MS just decides to let the game ship as is on the S(which isnt a bad idea at this point). MK 1 shipped in an as is form for the Switch, you knew what you were buying. I dont blame Game Science for simply releasing the PS5 version of the game first. They went with the more user friendly economical experience. On PC consumers can buy better hardware, on the PS5 you get a highly optimized game that runs on decent settings. Another angle to this is that Sony saw more of the potential for the title because I dont understand why MS with all its resources didnt dedicate a dev team to help with the release. I think they didnt expect it to perform quite well considering it was a single player 3rd person title and not the usual online multiplayer with potential to sell microtransactions and what not.

Pretty sure this is incorrect. Larian is on record saying they had issues with the Series S because Microsoft wanted feature parity with the X, but they couldn’t get split-screen to work properly. They ultimately dropped it.
Yeah it was the feature parity issue.
 
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