Eddie-Griffin
Banned
Whether or not the Xbox Series S is going to be able to stick around for as long as the current generation lasts is something that’s been questioned more than a few times over the last couple of years. Many, of course, have made their opinion on the same known, but it seems like though Xbox Series S its fair share of fans who believe it to be a sufficiently powerful machine, there are others who are less convinced about the gap between it and the Xbox Series X.
Someone who falls in the former category, it seems, is Paulo Luis Santos, game director at Flux Games – the developer of the recently-released fighter Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising. Speaking during a recent interview with GamingBolt, when asked about the weaker variant of the current-gen line of Xbox consoles, Santos said that he feels there’s enough to differentiate the Xbox Series X and S, and that the latter should be able to “hold up for a good while.”
“I believe that a customer that purchases the Series S is aware that it’s not the same specs as Series X, and is generally fine with that, so it shouldn’t be a huge problem if it’s slightly different from its more powerful sibling,” he said. “That being said, I think in general Series S should hold up for a good while and since these technologies evolve so fast it’s super hard to predict how long it lifecycle will be.”
Microsoft, of course, has remained insistent the Xbox Series S doesn’t hold back game development, but rather advances it owing to how much more accessible it is, thanks to its cheaper price and greater availability. Some developers, however, have talked about the constraints its relatively weaker hardware puts on essentially any game that intends to release for the Xbox Series X as well. Whether or not this turns into a significant issue for developers at large remains to be seen.
Gamingbolt will Gamingbolt but I agree with Cobra Kai 2's director that consumers are aware of the differences and choose accordingly.
I also don't really think there's need for a "debate" about if the S is holding development back, when even back near launch Microsoft made it clear the intention was to start with the X and downscale to the S, despite people trying to say otherwise,
“We did a lot of analysis of what it would really mean to run a game at 4K with 60fps and then to scale that down to 1440p at 60fps,” says Jason Ronald, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, in an interview with The Verge. “The reality is you don’t need as much memory bandwidth because you’re not loading the highest level MIP levels into memory. You don’t need the same amount of memory as well.”
Microsoft believes developers have a number of ways to build Xbox Series X games for 4K resolutions and then downscale them to 1440p for the Series S. “Developers have a whole host of different techniques, whether that’s changing the resolution of their title, things like dynamic resolution scaling frame to frame — that’s something we’ve seen a lot of adoption of, especially towards the end of this generation,” explains Ronald.
If there are developers doing this backwards that's their fault not Microsofts imo.
Phil already said from the start the intention was for the S to stock around throughout the generation, so the Series S isn't going anywhere whether anyone likes it or not. In anycase, people with Series X or a PS5 shouldn't care about the Serries S, it's not for them it's for parents, people who (as a MS exec said) spend 20 minutes here and there on games, or people who just need a cheap device to play COD, Fortnite and others. S has no effect on the X or PS5 so a lot of the concern we have been seeing recently with very weak evidence is starting to get ridiculous.