TheXbox Series Smight be a great deal for gamers, but not so much for developers. This cheaper hardware doesn’t just keep its price down by omitting a disc drive, but also by compromising the performance, giving devs less to work with.
But despite these headaches,Xboxhas no plans to ditch its budget console. Speaking after the Xbox Games Showcase,Xbox Game Studioshead Matt Booty makes it clear that the company won’t allow devs to skip the Series S and launch exclusively on theSeries X. Instead, he says these issues can be avoided if the developers “plan better”, suggesting that the performance of games on the console will improve with experience.
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“Is it more work? Sure,” says Booty, speaking withAxiosabout the troubles devs have faced when developing for the Series S alongside Series X, PS5, and PC. He goes on to say that devs should find it easier once they’ve moved onto their second game for the platform, since they can “plan better, knowing where some of the sharp corners are.”
This comes as many games thatdorun on Series S often struggle to reach 60fps at launch, even with reduced visuals. Often, we’re seeing 60fps added further down the line, and never in a joint framerate/visuals mode like Series X players enjoy.
However, sometimes sacrificing visuals or framerate isn’t enough. Recently,Baldur’s Gate 3developer Larian revealed that an Xbox launch hadn’t been confirmed yet because it couldn’t guarantee an adequate performance on Series S - a requirement for launching on Series X.
“We’ve been unable to get splitscreen co-op to work to the same standard on both Xbox Series X and S, which is a requirement for us to ship,” said Larian,speaking to TheGamer back in February. “We have no exclusivity for which platforms we can bring BG3 to, or when, and will announce support for additional platforms if and when we’re ready.” The spokesperson went on to say that news of an Xbox port will come when the team is “certain” that these issues have been addressed.
Yet given Booty’s statement today and Xbox’s ongoing strategy, it definitely seems unlikely that the industry giant will make any further concessions. At the Xbox Games Showcase, Phil Spencerunveiled yet another Xbox model, but it’s still not as powerful as the Series X, let alone surpassing it. Instead, it plays games at the same quality as the Series S, but doubles the amount of storage space. Xbox alsoisn’t working on a next-gen equivalent of the Xbox One Xanytime soon, so it certainly seems that developers will have to continue navigating around the Series S specs.
