It's been a real weird week for Xbox, with confusion over the status of Black Myth: Wukong, third-parties noting the ongoing challenges for development on Series S, and frustration from indie devs over poor communication coming out all at once. These are all isolated problems, but the as the industry and fans alike continue to struggle to understand Xbox's position in 2024, they're coming up at an inauspicious moment.
Xbox entered this console generation in 2020 with two new platforms: the Xbox Series X, comparable in power to Sony's competing PS5, and the less powerful Series S model. Series S can, in theory, do everything that the Series X can - just at lower resolutions and frame rates - and it sells at an attractive price point for players who don't demand the most high-end gaming experiences. But since even before the launch of the generation, fans and developers alike have feared that developing a game for Xbox - and thus having to support both Series S and X - could hamstring the creation of new, high-end games.
Dune: Awakening chief product officer Scott Junior rather gently indicated that's still the case in a recent interview with VG247. "It's one of the reasons we're coming out on PC first," Junior said. "There's a lot of optimisations we need to do before we release on the Xbox. But yeah, Xbox Series S is a challenge."
That quote comes just after the other controversy around Black Myth: Wukong has been coming to a head. Developer Game Science said months before launch that it was "optimizing the Xbox Series X|S version to meet our quality standards, so it won't release simultaneously with the other platforms." At the time, the delay of the Xbox version of such a visually impressive game seemed like a sure signal that the Series S problem had struck once again.
The Black Myth: Wukong saga only got stranger last week, when Forbes contributor Paul Tassi reported via an anonymous source that the game was delayed on Xbox due to an "exclusivity deal." IGN corroborated that report with its own sources. Other insiders soon after definitively asserted that there's no exclusivity deal keeping Wukong off Xbox. IGN has stood by its original report, and Tassi has since reiterated that he was "specifically told it’s not a tech issue for Xbox causing delay."
It's all extremely confusing, which is par for the course on Xbox's relationship with its third-party developers at this point. The dev behind the Soulslike Enotria has announced an indefinite delay to the game's Xbox version, claiming that Xbox has ignored its emails for months. "You can ask Xbox why they haven't answered us for two months," the studio said in a message to fans. "Obviously they don't care about Enotria and they don't care about you."
Taken in aggregate, what does all this mean? Maybe nothing! These could all be isolated cases of various Xbox policies coming to public light in poor circumstances. But if you took an optimistic view of the Series S when it was first announced, or hoped that Microsoft would keep the lights on at studios like Tango Gameworks, or bought a modern Xbox to play exclusives like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, well… It's getting increasingly difficult to keep that optimism alive.
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