Xbox boss Phil Spencer has addressed the fact Baldur’s Gate 3 launches on PS5 before Xbox Series X and S in an interview at gamescom 2023.
I think it was a mistake for Microsoft to sell the Series S version as nextgen. It was a disservice to players who wanted a capable nextgen console. They should have sold a disk less and regular version like Sony did. Selling a less powerful console and expecting game developers to just make it work is dumb.
It almost seems like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen, but Microsoft never claimed all developers would honor their parity plan and make the games. I do see developers not spending the extra time and money trying to make it work.
At launch the X and S were $500 and $300 respectively. A rather significant price difference, but I think MS could have possibly split the difference between the two and counted on higher volumes for a slightly better component cost and ended up with a $400-450 launch price for a single console.
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You say it doesn’t use the hardware correctly, but the reason it can’t run in the S is because it’s got less RAM than last gen hardware, and they can’t get split screen to work because it needs more RAM. As the article points out, they have Microsoft engineers coming in trying to help them get split screen running, and they still might not be able to get it working until next year. That’s not an optimization issue. They would happily just disable split screen on the S like they did on the Steam Deck, but Microsoft parity requirements mean they can’t.
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The last Xbox I owned was the 360 (I still have in in the closet). I made a choice to go with Sony’s PlayStation and a good Linux gaming PC to cover almost all my games bases. But I do want ALL the games to come to Xbox players.
I remember seeing GTA V on the Xbox 360 and marvelling at the 20 fps on the lowest possible settings.
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Curious to know what Phil claims to have learned. It seems like the dedication to feature parity is giving their competitors an unnecessary advantage and/or upsetting the player base (In the case of Halo).
I think it’s shitty to also put this problem back in the developers and say “it’s a creative decision”. Okay well how about those devs creatively only put their games on PlayStation or PC, Phil?
