It was only last week Microsoft confirmed that Black Myth Wukong was still on its way to Xbox, following the removal of the Xbox logo from the title’s marketing material back in June that spurred speculation Wukong was never heading to Microsoft’s console.
Black Myth Wukong has already sold more than 10 million copies worldwide as of August 23, which was only three days after its release, along with it shattering the Steam record for the most-played single-player game in the platform’s history with 2.3 million concurrent players. With the extreme popularity of Black Myth Wukong Xbox gamers are undoubtedly chomping at the bit to find out when the title is releasing on their console, and why it has been delayed.
Officially, neither Game Science or Microsoft has revealed why Wukong wasn’t released on Xbox at the same time as PlayStation and PC. Forbes speculated in a recent article that Wukong was suffering from a similar fate as Baldur’s Gate 3, which had development issues related to the low-end Xbox console variant, the Xbox Series X. In summarization, Black Myth Wukong is still being optimized for lower-end hardware as Microsoft requires developers to launch a game on all of its console variants and not selectively.
“At Gamescom, I spoke to Xbox insiders and developers who informed me about a technical issue affecting the launch of Black Myth: Wukong on Xbox consoles.
Apparently, the game is suffering from a bug known as “Memory Leak,” which can cause significant crashes that could compromise the performance of your Xbox console. Because of this issue, the game has not passed Xbox’s bug detection tests and has therefore been delayed indefinitely until they manage to optimize the game for Series X|S.
The studio is already working hard to resolve this issue and achieve the necessary certification. Once they get approval, they will set a release date for the game, but they do not yet know when or how, but apart from that error the game is “close to being ready,”” reads the translation
But what are the optimization issues that need to be fixed? A post that has since gone viral in the r/GamingLeaksAndRumors subreddit, which cites a post from @eXtas1stv on X, points to a technical issue being the culprit of the delayed launch of Black Myth Wukong on Xbox. The post states Xbox insiders informed the source at Gamescom 2024 the game is “suffering from a bug known as “Memory Leak,” which can cause significant crashes that could compromise the performance of your Xbox console“.
It should be noted that these are just rumors at the moment and neither Xbox or Game Science has officially revealed why Black Myth Wukong has been delayed or when it will launch.