Opinion: Xbox might have dug themselves into a problem for game devs

[VixAAT]

Xbox's strategy with the Series S and X is to make two different consoles differentiating in power and disc drive. This could possibly lead devs to make two versions of games to work well on both consoles. Sony has different strategy of releasing one console and then just removing the disc drive. This means devs don't need to make two versions of the game. This could be a helping factor for Sony in the future when the next gen consoles will have exclusives by not having a confusing line up for the consumers.

 

What are your thoughts?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Sony did.... the same thing last year, so did microsoft. They had the stock, then the pro (or x for the xbox). Microsoft had th e One X  and the One s last year, as well at the normal. There will just be a normal game, with a Series x mode.

[Eigenvektor]

27 minutes ago, TheAverageGamer said:

This could possibly lead devs to make two versions of games to work well on both consoles.

They don't need to make two versions of the game. Same game, different settings, automatically selected based on hardware. When a game is ported to PC they typically add options for graphics settings anyway.

 

I'd say it's more of a problem for consumers, because you now need to consider more variables when deciding which console to get.

[Pixel5]

given that consoles more then ever are almost 1:1 PC hardware i agree with the others here that they will have no problem at all as any game will have different texture resolutions and other options they can toggle anyways so they will have no problem at all.

[Kawaii Koneko]

As has been said, both MS and Sony did the exact same thing with the base consoles and the Pro and X variant.

 

If anything, it will be easier for devs this time to go from the Series X to S. The CPU is the same in both consoles, the GPU is where the main difference lies. It is a lot easier for a dev to scale back graphics than it is CPU requirements. This means games with a lot of physics or NPC behavior that is dependent on the CPU won't need to be scaled back so you will get parity between the two systems. The devs will just need to scale back graphics. 

 

So this means for gamers who don't care about 4k or the best possible fps, the core experience will still be the same. It's actually a pretty smart move the way MS handled this.