A developer from indie studio Bossa Studios has finally said what we have all been thinking. The Xbox Series S is limiting the potential of games made for the current generation of consoles.
The debate was initiated by veteran games journalist Jeff Gertsmann. He claimed the opposite, that the whole ‘Series S is holding back next-gen games’ argument doesn’t hold up. He said, “Most of these games also come to PC and already have to cover a wide variety of configs”.
To this, VFX artist Ian Maclure responded,
“Studios have been through one development cycle where Series S turned out to be an albatross around the neck of production, and now that games are firmly being developed with new consoles in mind, teams do not want to repeat the process,”
We’d love to show you the tweets, which were publicly visible earlier, but have since been restricted to approved followers. A sure sign that a little spice found its way into the debate.
Of course, the Xbox Series S comes in a whole lot cheaper than the Series X. IT retails for $300 / £25 versus $599 / £449 for the more powerful console. It offers a much more accessible entry point into new gen in a time when belts are tightening further by the day. But the cheaper price comes at a cost of lower technical specs, targeting 1440p gaming opposed to native 4K.
Upcoming title Gotham Knights will reportedly run only at 30fps, a limitation many blame on the Series S
This argument followed a series of now deleted tweets from Rocksteady senior character technical artist Lee Devonald. Following the reveal that upcoming title Gotham Knights would not come with performance options, and would run at a disappointing 30 FPS on all consoles, fingers were pointed at the Series S. From Devonald,
“I wish gamers understood what 60fps means, in terms of all of the things they *lose* to make the game run that fast,” he said (via Gamerant). “Especially taking into account that we have a current-gen console that’s not much better than a last gen one.”
Responding to a question about a hardware bottleneck, he singled out the Xbox Series S GPU, noting that multi-platform games need to “optimise for the lowest performer.”
Devonald went on to claim that there’s an “entire generation of games, hamstrung by that potato”, because of Microsoft’s insistence that games are released on both consoles.
But it’s not just Devonald. Digital Foundry’s Alexander Battaglia claimed in May to have heard from some developers that memory constraints were making Xbox Series S a “pain” to work with.
“We’ve heard from multiple developers that they kind of feel the Series S is a bit of a pain at times – not the CPU or GPU power there, but it’s more like the memory constraints,” he said.
In a game software development kit released in June, Microsoft said it had made “hundreds of additional megabytes of memory” available to Xbox Series S developers. “This gives developers more control over memory, which can improve graphics performance in memory constrained conditions,” the platform holder said.
But despite the criticism levelled at Microsoft from an increasing number of developers, the Series S continues to outperform its more expensive brother in the majority of markets. But whether this issue evolves into a divergence of game availability across both consoles in the future remains to be seen.
Source; Video Games Chronicle
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