Game Development Studios reportedly asking Xbox to drop Xbox Series S Compatibility Requirement to only focus on Series X

[AlTech]

Summary

 

Microsoft's Xbox Division is reportedly getting asked by developers to drop the requirement that all Xbox Series X games also support Xbox Series S. According to sources VGC talked to, many game development studios are in talks witht e Xbox Division to ask to drop Xbox Series S support because they believe it is comprising their vision for what they want their game on Xbox Series X to look like.

 

A big limitation apparently holding back games on Series S is the amount of RAM the console has. The Series S has only 10GB of RAM compared to the Series X's 16GB of RAM.

 

Quote

"It might sound broken, but the reason you are hearing it a lot right now is because MANY [sic] developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped," wrote Maclure.

"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," added Maclure, whose account is now private at the time of writing.

 

Quote

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.

Quote

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.

“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.”

 

 

My thoughts

Whilst I think some of the complains made against Series S are valid, I disagree that 60fps is a hard to hit target or that gamers lose things so that a game runs that fast. I'm not sure why this developer thinks anything less than 60fps should be the standard or why people wouldn't be willing to make the tradeoff to get 60fps instead of 30fps. I honestly also don't think with these next gen consoles that it even needs to be a trade off. Optimize your game well enough and it should be able to look good and run at a good framerate. If you force Ray Tracing then of course you're gonna get 30fps and a bad time on next gen console. But that's precisely why you shouldn't.

 

I seriously hope Microsoft doesn't back down because both the Series S and Series X should be supported. If Microsoft backs down it'll be a betrayal to everybody who bought a Series S.

 

Anyways, that's just my thoughts and opinions.

 

Sources

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/developer-claims-many-studios-are-asking-xbox-to-drop-mandatory-series-s-compatibility/

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/studios-asking-xbox-to-drop-xbox-series-s-requirement-dev-says-system-has-become-albatross/1100-6508459/

[PocketNerd]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

My thoughts

 

Whilst I think some of the complains made against Series S are valid, I disagree that 60fps is a hard to hit target or that gamers lose things so that a game runs that fast. I'm not sure why this developer thinks anything less than 60fps should be the standard or why people wouldn't be willing to make the tradeoff to get 60fps instead of 30fps. I honestly also don't think with these next gen consoles that it even needs to be a trade off. Optimize your game well enough and it should be able to look good and run at a good framerate. If you force Ray Tracing then of course you're gonna get 30fps and a bad time on next gen console. But that's precisely why you shouldn't.

Tell us you don't understand game development without telling us you don't understand game development.

 

Do you want pretty or do you want performance? You can't have it both ways.

[Guest]

Damn bro, that series S is only 1/3 as good, no wonder... it's like an Xbox one revision 3.

 

I guess that's what happens when you release two "equal" products where one product is objectively insanely better.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Optimize your game

mfs can't even release a complete game and you want them to also optimize for two systems?

MAnnnnnnn

[porina]

As contradictory as it is, I agree to both that if you want to make cutting edge games, you shouldn't be held back by weak hardware, but also the S should remain supported. How do you do both? I'd argue devs could just drop Xbox entirely for cutting edge games, or relegate them to 2nd tier and release it much later. PS5 and PC can move forward and not be dragged back by MS. Yes, I'm also suggesting PC minimum requirements could go up much more for these games. Maybe one to play on Steam Hardware Survey later, but what's the potential market if we set the recommended PC spec to something like decent 6+ core CPU (Coffee Lake, Zen 2 or newer), 16GB ram, 2070/3060/6700XT, SSD install mandatory (SATA ok). I tried to allow a bit higher requirement due to AMDs poor RT performance but the PS5/XSX would still be a limit in that case. For context I'm assuming RT should be standard for top tech tier games going forward, and this requirement kinda echos a blend of Cyberpunk 2077 RT and Elden Ring requirements.

 

Edit: Steam Hardware Survey look at my requirements:

6+ cores form 58%, but this may include older weaker CPUs like 1st gen Ryzen or ancient Xeons that don't fully meet my proposed requirements.

16+ GB of ram: 69%, nice

The GPU requirement I proposed might be the hardest part. That would take a lot of work to manually sort and add up, but doing a quick eyeball count, I estimate 20% of Steam users would qualify there.

[dizmo]

Eh I fully support dropping Xbox S support. IMO it was a poor choice to release it at all. It'd be interesting to see what sales of each console is though. If they discontinued the S, then they'd have every reason to have new titles not support it. I think that's the only way they come out of this without losing a ton of favour.

 

All comes down to money though. If they sell a ton of lower end consoles then...

 

I want prettier games. Let's lose the trash tier hardware. 

 

 

[Thaldor]

If the difference was only the 6GB of RAM but when there is marginally weaker CPU (3.8/3.6Ghz vs. 3.6/3.4Ghz) and significantly weaker GPU (52 CUs @ 1.825Ghz vs. 20 CUs @ 1.565Ghz). The Series X is on paper 3 times more powerful graphic spitter (12 TFLOPS vs. 4 TFLOPS) than Series S, so if you try to optimize for the Series S, you will be sacrificing the potential of the Series X but if you optimize for the Series X, the Series S will commit sudoku halfway through the intro sequence. I don't exactly know what are the modern Microsoft release deals and requirements but I would guess if you were to spent the extra time to make two different builds (separate for S and X) you would most likely also need to "pay" Microsoft for releasing 2 games for Xbox Series, and now just to remind the scale of money in that back in Xbox 360 era Microsoft required $40,000 from devs for a patch, after Double Fine got enough and spilled the beans and made that known to the public Microsoft did drop the fees for patching but those costs were moved to elsewhere.

 

Now the article doesn't tell one very important thing: Does the game need to look the same on both consoles? As in by sacrificing the storage space it wouldn't be more than just  work to make smaller textures, less detailed models and optimized settings for Series S, BUT that would mean even the blind opossum would notice they are playing gimped down version of the game on their Series S. But I would believe there is a clause for that and the game must perform and look the same (minus the special features on Series X) on both consoles because while Microsoft doesn't hide the fact that Series S is a lot worse console when it comes to the HW, but they also don't underline that the Series S has that much weaker GPU and your experience may be impacted by that.

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, PocketNerd said:

Tell us you don't understand game development without telling us you don't understand game development.

 

Do you want pretty or do you want performance? You can't have it both ways.

If those are the only 2 options I'd personally always pick performance so long as the game doesn't look ugly.

 

Many game devs on console for this generation have given players a choice in the settings menu to select either performance or quality where performance usually runs at 60fps but looks worse and quality runs at 30fps but runs better.

 

1 hour ago, fpo said:

Damn bro, that series S is only 1/3 as good, no wonder... it's like an Xbox one revision 3.

 

I guess that's what happens when you release two "equal" products where one product is objectively insanely better.

Microsoft never claimed they were equal.

[AlTech]

46 minutes ago, porina said:

As contradictory as it is, I agree to both that if you want to make cutting edge games, you shouldn't be held back by weak hardware, but also the S should remain supported. How do you do both? I'd argue devs could just drop Xbox entirely for cutting edge games

Middle management at game studios would never let it happen.

46 minutes ago, porina said:

or relegate them to 2nd tier and release it much later. PS5 and PC can move forward and not be dragged back by MS.

PS5 would then drag back PC then so by your logic why not cut out all consoles altogether?

46 minutes ago, porina said:

Yes, I'm also suggesting PC minimum requirements could go up much more for these games.

They already have to some extent. And the market has reacted to having insanely high GPU requirements like with Cyberpunk: they're not gonna sell as good as other games if people can't play them.

 

The more people you want to be able to play your game, the lower the requirements have to be.

46 minutes ago, porina said:

Maybe one to play on Steam Hardware Survey later, but what's the potential market if we set the recommended PC spec to something like decent 6+ core CPU (Coffee Lake, Zen 2 or newer), 16GB ram, 2070/3060/6700XT, SSD install mandatory (SATA ok).

Minus the SSD requirement which is highly impractical for many reasons, the main one being the price of SSDs, that's already not that far away from the "recommended" requirements for AAA games these days.

 

I would argue it's wayyy too high of spec to be asking for that's the gaming world we live in today.

46 minutes ago, porina said:

I tried to allow a bit higher requirement due to AMDs poor RT performance but the PS5/XSX would still be a limit in that case. For context I'm assuming RT should be standard for top tech tier games going forward

For games that don't need to sell millions of units sure. For any game where selling lots of copies is more than a pipe dream there's no chance RT will be forced in that game whilst we have tons of hardware that can't do RT and tons of hardware that don't perform well in RT (including RTX 30 series cards).

46 minutes ago, porina said:

and this requirement kinda echos a blend of Cyberpunk 2077 RT and Elden Ring requirements.

Those games are outliers and IMHO shouldn't be used as an example of what games should perform like. I'm not familiar with Elden Ring's  performance but I consider Cyberpunk 2077 to perform very badly.

46 minutes ago, porina said:

Edit: Steam Hardware Survey look at my requirements:

6+ cores form 58%, but this may include older weaker CPUs like 1st gen Ryzen or ancient Xeons that don't fully meet my proposed requirements.

16+ GB of ram: 69%, nice

The GPU requirement I proposed might be the hardest part. That would take a lot of work to manually sort and add up, but doing a quick eyeball count, I estimate 20% of Steam users would qualify there.

Which is far too low of a number for a game to target.

[Guest]

41 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

 

 

Microsoft never claimed they were equal.

Probably but like.... I didn't know they weren't and I don't know why they'd release it like that.... Yeah a lower tier model is nicer... Or a higher tier but don't that at the end of a generation makes more sense. 

Drastic specification differences confuse me. 

[RobPhebar]

IMO people having access to the games they want is more important than getting maximally shiny graphics. I understand that supporting the Series S is a pain for devs and I certainly don’t think “just optimize LOL” is a useful attitude to have. I don’t expect devs to support every bit of low-end hardware out there.

 

But people bought the Series S on the promise that it could play every new-gen game, even if it meant having worse visuals. I imagine a significant portion of Series S owners simply can’t afford anything more expensive. I think breaking that promise and alienating those people just for the sake of getting fancier graphics on Series X and PC would be a bad move.

[Fasterthannothing]

Unpopular opinion Microsoft needs to drop the S series from their game requirements maybe even drop the S entirely. Just let the devs make games run smoothly on the Series X and then just release a version for the series S with no constrictive requirements (ie if the devs want to cap it at 30fps fine if they want to drop the resolution fine) or even release the series S version of the game later 

[suicidalfranco]

Or you know... just give the same graphics settings that you give to the PC userbase to the Xbox. Sure console peeps will complain that they now have to fiddle in the settings to get a setup they like... yeah bar that. Just drop support for the S, console people cant do something as basic as tunning a game's graphics

[xAcid9]

I'm was expecting this when Microsoft releasing the series S. The gpu performance difference is just too large compare to the series X and the PS5.

It have next gen features but last last gen gpu performance. 

[TetraSky]

Not surprised, honestly.

Microsoft essentially released two different consoles here due to the spec differences, one was bound to be kicked to the curb at the earlier convenience of the devs.
Sony did the right thing by making their digital version of the console equal in specs.

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

 I disagree that 60fps is a hard to hit target or that gamers lose things so that a game runs that fast. I'm not sure why this developer thinks anything less than 60fps should be the standard or why people wouldn't be willing to make the tradeoff to get 60fps instead of 30fps. I honestly also don't think with these next gen consoles that it even needs to be a trade off. Optimize your game well enough and it should be able to look good and run at a good framerate. If you force Ray Tracing then of course you're gonna get 30fps and a bad time on next gen console. But that's precisely why you shouldn't.

Please never become a game developer. You're committing like cardinal sin #1 there. "I'm only gonna make my game work on the bleeding edge hardware nobody has"

 

6 hours ago, PocketNerd said:

Tell us you don't understand game development without telling us you don't understand game development.

 

Do you want pretty or do you want performance? You can't have it both ways.

Most of us who play PC games, understand this tradeoff, because the games often have tunables to allow us to decide what to tradeoff. Console games are just expected to work without any futzing around with settings.

 

In an ideal position, the console would tell the game the display resolution and refresh rate and make that decision for the player. This doesn't tend to shake out that well however, because when you get the PC port (when there is a PC port, Square Enix games are notoriously bad here) often things like pre-rendered cutscenes and baked UI components are scaled incorrectly, or not at all, and thus the game looks "worse" during specific sections of the game. When I opt to make tradeoffs, motion blur and anti-aliasing go first, because these tend to make the game look worse in the first place, and chug in high-motion scenes. But after that point I'll not make any specific adjustment as long as the game is close to 60fps..

 

Console games however tend to drop the frame rate or overall screen resolution, which is how we end up with "which console is better for X game" questions. Just because a specific console "can do" 1080p60, doesn't mean the games developed on it will be.

 

Often PS games were running at a much lower resolution than the actual screen to keep high frame rate. This only becomes evident when you play it on another console or the PC port and notice the frame rate and resolution drop in what was supposed to be a "Seamless" cutscene transition, and instead it's rather jarring.

 

Side note, game streamers often have to make larger compromises, and you'll usually see people playing competitive MMO games with all the "settings" set to the worst quality settings so they have the highest frame rate, even if their hardware is more than capable of running it at the highest quality settings. 

[jagdtigger]

Xbox is now just a PC, just dial back the visual quality for the series S......

[HenrySalayne]

We have 20 years of PC gaming with RAM and performance differences ranging easily around 400%. And now trimming down a game to work with a little less RAM is an impossible task? Does it need to look and feel identical to the XBox X?

[Avocado Diaboli]

I fail to see the problem. In a world where the Nintendo Switch exists and many studios develop multiplatform games to run on what's easily the weakest hardware of the current console cycle while also developing tunable PC versions, this seems like a load of first-world problems to me. You want a solution for your conundrum? Stop producing games with the most expensive golden pixels in the world, meaning stop prioritizing graphics over gameplay, engagement and narrative. That way you don't have to make sacrifices when optimizing for different platforms and in turn you get a game that people actually remember enjoying instead of eye-candy that only serves to get made fun of a few years later. I mean, Crysis is never remembered for being a particularly well-crafted shooter, all its praise was for its graphics tech. That's not a legacy I'd be proud of as a developer.

 

So yeah, I commend Microsoft for demanding developers also target the Series S. Why? Because that actually ensures that the games play well on the Series X and other consoles and we don't repeat the same mistakes from the previous two generations where it was acceptable to have games run at sub-30 fps just because developers prioritized graphics over performance. The Series S is a choke chain that rightfully reins in shitty developers.

[porina]

11 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

PS5 would then drag back PC then so by your logic why not cut out all consoles altogether?

I tried to draw recommended PC specs to similar to PS5 specs. I was a bit generous on the CPU cores, only requiring 6 instead of 8 for PC.

 

It was a balance for sufficient market share as you hinted at later. By cutting off the low end, how much market are you left with?

 

Very quick Google of unit sales:

PS5 lifetime (to July 2022): 21.7M

XBX/S lifetime (to July 2022): 16M estimated - can't find breakout of estimated X vs S sales. X is outselling S on Amazon.co.uk right now, would welcome more data.

https://metro.co.uk/2022/07/29/ps5-lifetime-sales-hit-21-7-million-but-sony-profits-are-down-37-17090126/

 

Steam monthly active users: I found a number of 120M here: https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-steam/

My >PS5-equivalent GPU estimate of 20% implies potential Steam RT gaming market of around 24M users. That's already in the same ball park as PS5 unit sales and bigger than total current gen XB. It is not going to be the biggest potential market, but likely still a big enough one.

 

Cyberpunk 2077 over 20M sales: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-hits-20-million-sales-milestone-following-recent-resurgence/

Elden Ring: 16.6M sales: https://www.eurogamer.net/elden-ring-sales-surpass-166m-worldwide

I recognise both of these do scale lower than my proposed spec as both will run on non-RT.

 

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition sales could be an interesting one to look for, if anyone can find it separated from base game. 

 

11 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Minus the SSD requirement which is highly impractical for many reasons, the main one being the price of SSDs, that's already not that far away from the "recommended" requirements for AAA games these days.

I'm not talking about making it mandatory for all games, just high end games needing higher end hardware as proposed. I don't consider SSD pricing to be a barrier and I think this is one of the easiest wins to move forward with. Also it doesn't mean you can't install it on HD if you really want to, but just expect the experience to be more worse than it historically is if you choose to do so.

[jagdtigger]

35 minutes ago, porina said:

Also it doesn't mean you can't install it on HD if you really want to, but just expect the experience to be more worse than it historically is if you choose to do so.

Actually it was alleged that some of the prev gen console and pc issues of cp2077 were stemming from this because the game expected an ssd not an old clunking spinning rust....

[porina]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

Actually it was alleged that some of the prev gen console issues were stemming from this because the game expected an ssd not an old clunking spinning rust....

Got some examples? The PS4 has really slow loading times as I think they only ever shipped with HDs, not 100% sure though. As such they heavily relied on compression to make it usable, which meant if you put in a SSD to a PS4, you saw little performance increase as it was decode bottlenecked. I don't have experience with that gen of Xbox.

[jagdtigger]

11 minutes ago, porina said:

Got some examples?

Yeah fixed it, i was referring to cp2077. It even has a slow hdd mode AFAIK....

[Doobeedoo]

Wow imagine the surprise. S should've never existed. Imagine being mandatory to support it. Also aside that one, on X no game should be 30fps that is straight up incompetence. Anything else dev says is bs and they don't know what they're doing, they're just bad. 

[yolosnail]

On 10/23/2022 at 1:24 AM, suicidalfranco said:

Or you know... just give the same graphics settings that you give to the PC userbase to the Xbox. Sure console peeps will complain that they now have to fiddle in the settings to get a setup they like... yeah bar that. Just drop support for the S, console people cant do something as basic as tunning a game's graphics

They don't even need to do that.

They just need to have 2 presets, Series X and Series S.

 

If they're complaining about having to optimise for two hardware options, then I can't imagine them ever releasing a game for the PC!