In a developer panel at the console game developer conference in South Korea, Harada shared his raw thoughts on the challenges on the Xbox Series S.
Who do these people think they are? Do they forget they have a job because customers exist?
Or do they think they are just pure artists doing what they please with only their own challenges and desires.
Imagine complaining about hardware because it makes you optimize your code more effectively.
Personally, I almost wish developers were forced to develop games that run well on 10 year old hardware. That way, people on newer hardware get the performance they deserve.
Like back in the day when games were developed for ps3 for ages, and the PC gamers kept complaining that they couldn’t make full use of their gaming PCs.
That was because the developers didn’t do the extra bit of work to include additional rendering features. They didn’t do hardly anything for PCs in those days, sometimes they didn’t even include Mouse and Keyboard support and required a gamepad to play the game. Also they had to deal with Windows Vista and Games for Windows Live.
I get what you’re trying to say, but you are intentionally leaving things out, which is disingenuous.
Complaining about not using your whole PC is way less of an issue than complaining about really bad performance on hardware that definitely should not be struggling.
“It constantly throws challenges at us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly.”
Taken out of context this is more of a self-burn
In context it makes more sense.
You develop an AAA title with high hardware requirements because hell, the game engine needs it.
Then comes Xbox and says “hey here’s half the specs of the mainstream baseline, make your game run on it”
It is a bit shitty.
The XBOX Series S doesn’t come to you after you finished your work. The Series S is there since the beginning. If you ignored it, its on you. Microsoft just says, if you want to publish your game, it has to run on both variants. That’s not shitty. Games are released on PC anyway (at least the Tekken games), and so have to run on hardware similar in performance to Series S.
Hey man, not everyone can afford expensive hardware and you don’t have to realease on it.
Everyone deserves culture.
With consoles, the console is the baseline… Adding an extra entry that is half the specs, while the competition adds a “pro” version that is beefier, makes things harder.
Also, “everyone deserves culture” and “you don’t have to release on it” is kinda antithetical.
Everyone deserves culture to the extent you don’t impose on others. I won’t judge anyone if they don’t want to put in the work for series S with limited ROI. But a lot of devs do and it’s nice to have that available to you for an amount that’s not exorbitant.
With consoles, the console is the baseline… Adding an extra entry that is half the specs, while the competition adds a “pro” version that is beefier, makes things harder.
The whole point is that you have something more affordable for those folks who can only go for the affordable option.
Oh, and you do have to release on it. Microsoft demands parity, which is the issue.
Oh, I was then wrong there.
To be fair the CPU is similar enough and GPU workloads are easier to scale
Memory management would be the most challenging thing
That’s the worst part, the memory is cut back too much. Now from todays standpoint, it might make sense. But back then at launch, memory wasn’t this expensive thing as we know it now. Not only is it just 10gb, even handheld PCs have 16, its also much slower memory connection. This is too much.
Xbox and PlayStation are just vanity PCs now. All that technology and horsepower hidden behind artificial lockouts and a kiosk OS. It’s honestly easier to just make a PC game with controller support.
Especially with the Steam Machine around now.
I seriously cannot express just how satisfied I am by the steam controller on Linux. I don’t have a keyboard and mouse for my gaming PC in my living room - because I don’t need it.
Agreed.
What I’d love to see is a market where you have big gaming rigs for pc builders and Steam Machine equivalents for people who used to have consoles.
I’d be really happy to see other manufacturers creating something equivalent to the Steam Machine, just like it happened for the Steam Deck.
I wish Microsoft could name their consoles better.
The naming system for the Xbox is genuinely terrible. A confusing mess. I hate Sony as well but at least there’s no room for speculation about what the next Playstation will be called.
However, they too made a mess of naming their Sony Xperia phones. Xperia 1 VII, Xperia 1 VIII, Xperia 10 VII, Xperia 10 VIII like who decided that double numbers was a good idea?? Lol
I just call them “XBOX whateverthefuck” because they’re so stupidly named I refuse to learn what the actual differences are.
It’s everything Microsoft really. New new Teams, new Outlook, everything named copilot, office and entra being renamed every other week…
The new scooby doo movies
You left the “Windows App” off that illustrious list.
I think I mentally blocked it 🤦
Don’t get me started on Sony headphones…
Oh yeah, the “Sony [bottom noises] with ANC”
They really have made a complete mess of naming consoles :/
Nintendo started it with the wii u
I don’t even know what kind of xbox I have.
The problem to me is the demand for feature parity and availability on both Microsoft specs. Same issue they forced on developers and consumers with the Xbox 360 with no HDD.
It does legitimately force an entire generation to design for the lowest common denominator and everyone pays for that opportunity cost.
If Microsoft just allowed companies the freedom to skip the Series S, or reduce more settings/features, then it wouldn’t be a problem.
But of course if Microsoft allowed that then consumers would be upset they can’t play every game and it would reduce the value proposition.
And from a consumer perspective, I hate that. So yeah, I dont want more Series S type consoles either.
Especially cause enough games for years continue to be cross platform so if money is an issue just stick to the cheaper last gen consoles and wait for the price drops
What was the feature parity Microslop was asking for?
If it’s having the same game modes it doesn’t schock me. Of course if it’s having the same graphical fidelity on lower hardware, it ain’t the same.
Well I can’t agree with him as we need lower costing hardware and more optimization.
From what hés saying, I guess the problem is that it wasn’t different enough from a Series X and people were having the same expectations.
Wether it ain’t the case for the Switch 2 since there is no bigger brother.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t try have better looking games, but you can’t expect gamers to have more and more money, so consoles/PC should remain at a similar price as much as possible.
If getting new consoles means 3x times the price of the previous one, maybe don’t release a new one and keep releasing games for the old one.
The same applies to PC. I now have a Steam Deck and a Playstation 5, but I won’t be getting a Playstation 6, getting a Linux gaming PC around 2029 for sure.
Still I won’t invest more than 1200$ in a PC as it’s just too much.
If a developer can’t create a good looking game which tuns on that 1200$ PC, then they won’t be getting my money and they’ll also lose something. It’s a lose-lose situation so just scale the game so that it can run decently on every kind of PC.
The thing is, PC games don’t have this issue since expectations are different based on hardware configuration. A lot of great features have to be dropped from the end product since the Series S cannot support them, and Microsoft expects parity between console versions (whereas on PC you can just turn the setting off and put a minimum requirements section on steam for additional details so you can keep cool things available but disabled for the entry level hardware).
Also, the console subsidy is coming to a close, at least if Xbox’s repeated corporate restructurings (they can’t sustain a division making 50 cents on the dollar forever) and ongoing hardware prices are anything to go off of.
The switch 2 is a different animal due to the way Nintendo handles games, and I would argue expectations are also quite different compared to Xbox players (not to mention necessary concessions due to it being a portable platform with an emphasis on battery life over detail).
Regarding PC pricing, things are fucked right now, but the way to go on a budget is to ship of Theseus the thing by getting what you can with the money you have then upgrading your machine incrementally. It’s the boots theory of gaming where buying cheap consoles repeatedly will make you worse off in the long run compared to paying for a modular setup that has more longevity. (Don’t be scared of the used parts market either)
If there are PCs that can’t run a given game, even on lowest resolution, then some gamers on lower-spec PCs are being excluded; and the game could likely do better optimization.
The key is, usually features relate to graphical visuals. Half-Life 2’s expansive physics came out in 2004, and even then many future games dropped such elements or made them optional because they don’t add to the experience.
The difference here is that PC as a platform doesn’t get excluded just because it was built in a previous generation. And if it does get excluded for some technical reason (e.g. because the CPU is missing an instruction set), you can just upgrade the part that’s causing the incompatibility (even from a secondary market) instead of buying an entire new PC.
As a former games programmer who had the misfortune of working with that system, the problem with the S is that it had vastly lower performances than the X, but if you wanted to release on it you still had to find a way to make it run on that piece of crap, which was absolute hell for demanding games and kind of entirely defeated the purpose of releasing on console (where you can expect everyone to have the same hardware). As a sidenote, I’d love to talk to whoever was in charge of pulling that off for RDR2 because they clearly are a master of the dark arts.
That being said I totally agree with you on the lower costing hardware and optimization thing.
I agree. Dont release cutting edge hardware at a time when it’s too expensive for anyone to buy. All it will do is build resentment in the community that won’t have any games that take advantage of the hardware because developers aren’t stupidly going to invest in game development for a platform they know nobody is going to buy.
Anyway, the shortages are obviously caused by the AI bubble, and that’ll be popping in a year, so products will be cheaper, which is fortuituous, because people will also be a lot poorer
I get the feeling both the Switch and Deck benefited from the Series S.
If facing a PS5/Xx environment, console publishers that hear about performance issues would just shrug and go “Get a console or go home”. But they’re not just looking at those two targets anymore. They HAVE to account for the Series S, and maybe in future for the Deck, the Switch, phones, or even just the PS5 but in a “Performance” mode rather than Presentation.
It’s teaching devs scalability, even if that means they can’t laser focus on one system.
I don’t think any informed buyer had the expectation that a Series S would perform like the X. That’s like expecting a PS5 to have the same capabilities as a PS5 Pro.
That said, the naming really betrays the Series S. It would have been more clear to name it something like Xbox (gen) and Xbox (gen) Pro.
Anyhow, I think the Series S is especially critical to have on the market in a world where console prices are increasing with age. We are back to the early 2000s when Moores law collapsed and it’s no longer true that affordable hardware will double in capability year over year at roughly the same price point.
This dev is out of touch and making excuses for lazy optimization. Optimization is going to be critically important so that games run on cheaper hardware until prices drop again.
I wish consoles would go back to just having one model and that model is the definitive model. A model you can upgrade 3 years into the lifespan of the model’s life, but still stick to one model.
No more having to worry about a Series whatever or whether that model will have a disc adapter or not. Just one developed model.
If it wasn’t, Xbox would have only lost harder to PlayStation this go around.
Very true. It’s easy to say what he did now but I remember how difficult it was to find a Series X at the start and is partly why I have an S instead.
Nah. If Sony and Xbox could release more weaker consoles, that would be great. Maybe we can force publishers and developers to actually fucking optimise their games again.
The kind of optimization to make things run on the S aren’t really the optimizations you want to see. The main problems the S has are not enough memory and just slightly not enough compute. Couple that with the feature parity requirements from Microsoft, and it just means lower-res textures and meshes, and that any higher-end render features get cut outright, rather than shifted to a “high-end” option.
Weirdly, pushing for a “120 fps” mode leads to more meaningful optimization.
The S is still powerful hardware. Games are not suddenly that demanding, they are just made quicker and with less care for performance because the hardware is so powerful that it will take care of it.
I agree forcing developers to aim for 120fps also has the same effect, but an overall requirement to make games run better from the get go is good for mid to low end PCs too.
I see where he’s coming from. It’s yet another console to develop for.
It’s more of a microsoft problem since they require parity - I would imagine devs would be happier if they could just release a “series S” settings profile or just outright state that the series S cannot have a game version available without removing features from all builds of the game for just their sake.
Yeah. As someone who had to release two games on Xbox series, that’s the issue right here. If there was an option to not release on S no one would have minded, but of course that would have made Microsoft look bad in the console wars discourse.
