A good number of game studios aren’t happy with the Xbox Series S, according to new allegations made by Ian Maclure, a VFX artist for Bossa (I Am Fish) who took to Twitter this morning in response to a debate stirred by games journalist Jeff Gerstmann and claimed that “many” have been asking Microsoft to drop its rule that mandates game compatibility for its weaker Xbox console. Gerstmann made it known that he doesn’t agree with the idea that the Series S is holding back next-gen games, but if Maclure is to be believed, many in the industry don’t feel the same way. Xbox Series S costs $200 less than the flagship Series X but features lesser hardware, such a 20-CU (vs. 52 CU) AMD RDNA 2 GPU and 10 GB (vs. 16 GB) of GDDR6 memory.
“It might sound broken, but the reason you are hearing it a lot right now is because MANY developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped,” Maclure claimed.
“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,” he added before locking down his Twitter account so only approved followers can see them.
The whole “Series S is holding back next-gen games” argument seems really broken to me. Most of these games also come to PC and already have to cover a wide variety of configs. Like go look at the Steam Hardware Survey sometime. Lots of older stuff with significant percentages.
— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann) October 20, 2022
From a VGC report:
VFX artist Ian Maclure made the claim on Twitter in response to a comment from veteran games journalist Jeff Gerstmann, who said he thinks the whole ‘Series S is holding back next-gen games’ argument doesn’t hold up.
In a series of since-deleted tweets last week, which were initially sparked by the news that Gotham Knights won’t have performance options on consoles and runs at 30 FPS, Rocksteady senior character technical artist Lee Devonald also claimed that trade-offs need to be made because of Xbox Series S.
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.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →I always found this series S to be a bad idea, it's cool for indie games and such, but it's too weak for current gen AAA games, and if there is going to be a mid gen refresh like last gen, this is going to make it even worse.
One of the advantages of consoles was always that it had fixed hardware that made it easier to optimse for and that is gone now, it's also not a great seller as it has almost always been relatively easy to obtain while the series X and PS5's are still almost always out of stock.
What I'm trippin' on, though, is that many of these same lame whining devs are behind such titles that has super flopped before the Series S (Arkham Knight, etc.) buuuuut... they have no problem catering to the Nintendo Switch unit?! Wt...!
I agree. I can almost get behind the way Sony did the PS4 Pro -- it was a boosted hardware spec that came after some time. But even that created some friction.
Having two different hardware levels out of the gate though? Horrible idea. At least with the PS5 versions they have the same performance level, so you don't need a different version of the game.
I can almost see Microsoft's thinking though -- PC developers have to cater to different performance levels just as a matter of course, and you have mostly the same APIs on the Xbox, so if you make your game PC first it should port over to all the Xboxen with no issues...
... But console developers are used to optimizing to very specific hardware, whereas PC developers can brute force something and just say "Oh, well you need better hardware"
I guess two sides to every coin.
Wouldn't reducing resolution be enough? Is that age old settings in PCs really a feat of complex technology we are used to but its truly complex stuff? I mean if theres all that whining about, perhaps it is a complex issue, just that is normal for PCs.
Console game developers used to haaaate that about PC, they loved the fact that consoles were single hardware configurations. That all changed during 8th-gen with XB1X and PS4 Pro (and before that, to a lesser extent when Nintendo made the DSi and New 3DS refreshes). Now console devs have to design for different hardware setups too.
Game development is often limited by the lowest common denominator. It's already bad enough that modern-day devs do things the opposite way they should, by coding for consoles first then trying to port to PCs (rather than designing the game to truly use PC hardware and then porting down to consoles, like in the older days). Then during generation switches, cross-gen games are held back by the previous gen consoles. Now 9th-gen consoles themselves are being held back by the XBSS (which while having newer hardware and better CPU and GPU architecture than 8th-gen's XB1X is still technically less powerful than that system). It means that as a cross-platform developer, you no longer target proper 9th-gen systems, you have to target the lower XBSS too, and that's annoying. Towards the end of the generation the XBSS is gonna end up being more painful for devs than base PS4 and especially base XB1 were last gen.
Yupz.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA that is a very good point. Although it's impressive what some devs have been able to do to get 8th-gen games running on Switch, like the Doom 2016 port by Panic Button. Not even remotely the way you wanna play the game, but as a programming exercise it is nothing short of astonishing and impressive.
If you look at the ratio of gpu size in S & X, then anything that runs at 4K in X should run comfortably in 1080p in S
But some PC ports target high performance 1800p for X (& poorly optimized 4K for X)
Some games are multiplayer games & Microsoft doesn't allow 2 different networks for X & S gamers. They have to be interplayable. This could be another issue
Tell that to cdpr with what happened with cp2077.
What's funny is that they focused on PC first for Witcher 2 and 3 (although 3 to a lesser extent, that was after all a shared launch day for all platforms), so I thought they were gonna do it again with CP2077. Apparently not. The PS4 and XB1 versions of CP2077 are also a perfect example of what happens when devs try to focus on last-gen as well as current-gen. Those versions of the game should have never happened.
You would think it'll be easier to make the best possible version of a game on the best hardware you can use. Then when porting it to lesser hardware, start taking out things that aren't that important or lowing the quality of things not that important until it works at a desired performance level on that hardware.
These guys make it out like they're making two identical games for different hardware.
PC versions of games have settings the user can easily manipulate to get the desired performance they want and sacrificing what they don't want. How is that any different than last gen and current gen consoles? Just disable the options for the higher settings on the lesser consoles. Boom. Done.
Thats the logical reasonable explanation... Unless someone explains it really ain't that simple, I would guess they are crying about this because they blow the budget on Hollywood actors, parties and promotional activities, then left overs for the game development, then the leftovers of the leftovers go to quality testing. QA testing money is deeply scrutinized, because you got to scrutinize and cut something somewhere, so management can have a job, hence complaints about two xboxes meaning double QA for 1 gen of console. In reality the series S is probably the more widespread console of the 2, I know its the one always available to purchase, i actually havent seen a series x in the wild.
With recent generation consoles being so close to actual PC hardware it seems it would make sense to make it on PC first then port it to consoles. With the exception of Nintendo devices which I think still use ARM?
I think you are oversimplifying things a bit. If you have fixed hardware you only need one version of an asset as it runs the same on all machines, if you make a game for a PC you need different versions of a lot of the assets so they can be used depending on the graphical settings the user chooses.
Maybe for some games it would be as easy as lowering some settings to make it run just fine, but for others I can imagine it would be like making 2 different versions of the same game if you want them to perform decently and look and play similarly.
Also it seems that (for some games anyways) some of the issues come from the multiplayer aspect and keeping those versions consistent.
What I'm saying here is that asset for the "lower" setting is there. Just remove the actual asset for the higher setting, not just removing the menu setting.
No matter how you look at it - it’s still more “work” than supporting one static hardware platform. Just haggling over how much.
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Her: Absolutely not!
Him: Would you have sex with me for a million dollars?
Her: Maybe ...
Him: So you're willing to have sex with me, and we're just haggling over how much.