A developer has made some surprising claims about the Xbox Series S and how it is affecting the current state of video game development.

Responding to games writer Jeff Gerstmann, VFX artist Ian Maclure tweeted that many developers are trying to ask Microsoft to drop the requirements for getting games to launch on Xbox Series S.

Before Maclure made his account private, he elaborated on the situation with these comments:

“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.

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.”

The Xbox Series S was officially unveiled by Microsoft two years ago and is a significant revenue driver for the company. As of November 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, the little console that could outsold the Xbox Series X, its bigger brother, and even their major competitor the PlayStation 5. While the latter could partly be attributed to Sony’s supply issues, it’s still a strong sign of the console’s popularity.

That could be partly attributed to the Xbox Series S’ price, but it has to be said that the industry pays for this in other ways. The truth is the Xbox Series S is definitely a less powerful console than the Xbox Series X. While both consoles do run on an AMD supplied custom Zen CPU, the Xbox Series S has a less powerful GPU and less RAM than the Xbox Series X.

The Xbox Series X GPU has 56 compute units, running at 1.825 GHz and capable of 12 teraflops of power. The Xbox Series S GPU has 20 compute unites, running at 1.55 GHz and capable of 4 teraflops. T he Xbox Series X has 16 GB GDDR6 SDRAM, with 10 GB dedicated to graphics, and 6GB dedicated to other computing functions. The Xbox Series S has 10 GB GDDR6 SDRAM, with 8 GB dedicated to graphics and 2 GB allocated for other computing functions.

In interviews with other developers, both the GPU and RAM were described as bottlenecks to the development of their games. Rocksteady senior character technical artist Lee Devonald was willing to go on record that the Xbox Series S’ GPU was that bottleneck for this generation, with multiplatform games having to be built around the console as the lowest performer. Devonald pointed out that developers who want to release games on Xbox Series have to make their games for both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

Alexander Battaglia, a writer at Digital Foundry, revealed he heard from developers that it’s the memory constraints of the Xbox Series S that made the console difficult to work with. Microsoft responded to this criticism with a software development kit that freed up hundreds of megabytes of memory on the Xbox Series S.

This whole thing is genuinely a touchy subject for developers in light of the news that Gotham Knights would only be locked at 30 FPS, and that there would be no performance or quality options to increase that framerate. Devonald actually cited this situation in talking about the Xbox Series S and how it is limiting what developers can do with newer games.

If true, this would certainly be disappointing. The Xbox Series S is a great deal for players, and has kept many gamers up to date on games at a time when they could have been prohibitively expensive otherwise.

But if those games are getting worse because of the same console, it might not be good for the industry after all. At the very least, Team Xbox  could put more thought if continued support on the Xbox Series S is really worth it if it will harm the games that will come to its consoles and other platforms.

Source: VideoGamesChronicle