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Premature anxiety.

On August 3, a Brazilian gaming media Gameplays Cassi published a report saying that they recently interviewed the development teams of Shadow Blade Zero and Black Myth during ChinaJoy.

Gameplays Cassi described in the report that the two developers admitted that they had a cooperative relationship with Sony, and Sony provided assistance to the team in game development and promotion, but they did not sign an exclusive contract, and it was still the freedom of the development team to decide where to sell the game.

According to the official announcement, Shadow Blade Zero is tentatively scheduled to be released on PS5 and PC platforms. Gameplays Cassi said that the explanation they got from the anonymous interviewee of the Shadow Blade Zero team was that no one wanted the Xbox platform, the Xbox console was not popular in Asia, and Microsoft created an "overloaded" ecosystem, making it difficult for people to develop games for it.

This controversial statement quickly attracted the attention of domestic and foreign media. After the news spread, the official of "Shadow Blade Zero" also came out to clarify that the report was false, stating that no platform had been excluded and that it would strive to allow as many players as possible to experience the game.

After the official rumor was refuted, the Brazilian media quickly changed its tone, but it only changed the tone of the controversial statement, and the essential meaning did not change much.

This report actually does not include any substantive interview evidence.

Coincidentally, Black Myth, another highly anticipated Chinese game, also had some problems on Xbox. Not long ago, Game Science suddenly announced that the Xbox version would be delayed due to optimization issues. As soon as the news came out, it also sparked some conspiracy theories: Black Myth signed an exclusive agreement with Sony.

It's not the first time that a blockbuster game has not been able to catch up with the Xbox due to optimization. For example, when Baldur's Gate 3 was well received on various platforms, there was no news about the Xbox version for a long time, which made many people think that Larian and Sony had signed an exclusive agreement.

In response to this, Larian's distribution director also expressed his grievance, saying that "Baldur's Gate 3" was really not exclusive, but just encountered technical difficulties on the XSS host. Some functions that can be realized on XSX will take a lot of time to solve on XSS.

These problems are believed to be mainly related to the models and strategic policies launched by Xbox in this generation. XSX and XSS are both new-generation consoles, but the performance of XSS is much weaker than that of XSX. Microsoft requires developers to treat the two consoles equally. Whatever XSX has, XSS must have as well.

Perhaps the excellence of Baldur's Gate 3 exceeded Microsoft's imagination, so Microsoft later negotiated with Larian to make concessions - allowing the XSX and XSS versions developed by it to have slight differences in some functions, and the game was launched on Xbox at the end of 2023. At this time, the 2023 TGA just ended, and Larian Studios once won many awards, and Xbox players' Baldur's Gate 3 was finally released.

Although there have been previous cases of green lights, it is foreseeable that many unknown developers are destined to not have the strength and treatment like Larian. Even the well-known "Black Myth" is now unable to overcome the objective limitations of the "82 difficulties" to successfully land on the Xbox platform. But on the other hand, if Microsoft allows developers to abandon XSS, it will indeed be difficult to explain to those users who bought XSS consoles.

Microsoft's dual-console plan was originally intended to benefit users, but now it has instead caused a dilemma, which may be something Xbox users did not expect back then.

But then again, according to the statement of the producer of "Shadow Blade Zero", there is still some time before the release date of "Shadow Blade Zero". No one can say whether the subsequent game will add an Xbox version, and players do not need to be too anxious.