I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:

"The possible future that we originally saw for Xbox – the excitement about Microsoft’s renewed commitment to building up its studios to the point where it could be a genuine rival to Sony’s software slate – hangs in the balance. The alternative, in which almost a hundred billion dollars in total is spent to buy enough publishers to make Microsoft a major player, is probably the reality we’re getting.

“The extent to which that will hamper further development of Microsoft’s own game studios and first-party publishing remains to be seen, but it’s highly unlikely that the effect will be zero; no company, not even Microsoft, has unlimited bandwidth to keep every plate spinning all at once.”

  • @dillekant@slrpnk.net
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    310 months ago

    The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,

    Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.

    I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.

    • Jordan Lund
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      410 months ago

      By that argument they could do split screen for Baldur’s Gate 3 if they just ran it at 640x480 in 16 colors, but who would play it? :)

      • @dillekant@slrpnk.net
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        310 months ago

        I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example