Developers are asking Microsoft to stop making it mandatory to optimise their games for the Xbox Series S.

We wrote about the Xbox Series S the other day, where a Rocksteady developer called it a “potato” because of its GPU. Still, other developers have also criticised the currently cheapest, BD-driveless, and less powerful than the PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X console. Next to them, we can add Ian Maclure, the visual effects artist at indie Bossa Studios.

A veteran video game journo, Jeff Gerstmann, suggested on Twitter that the “Xbox Series S is holding everything back” line of thinking doesn’t hold because most games are also released on PC and therefore need to cover a wide range of configurations. To this, Maclure, who worked on last year’s I Am Fish (Xbox Series, PC), gave a more detailed response, but we can’t link to it because he has since made his profile private, so only his followers can read the following directly:

“It might sound broken, but you are hearing it a lot right now 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 became an albatross around the neck of production. Now that games are firmly being developed for new consoles, teams do not want to repeat the process,” Maclure wrote.

In May, Alexander Battaglia of Digital Foundry said that several developers had pointed out that the Xbox Series S’s memory limitations were a bit of a pain. (But since then, we’ve heard more that the console’s GPU is causing the studios many headaches.) At least Microsoft has been working on that because a few hundred extra megabytes of memory are available to developers.

How much “the little guy” will hold back the console generation? Sony has no problem: the only difference between the two versions of PlayStation 5 is the presence of a Blu-ray drive. Still, rumour has it that they may release a console without it next autumn but with a separate drive so that they can produce just one console instead of the two they currently have…

Source: VGC