Phil Spencer Talks Xbox Disparity On X/S Platforms

Gamescom is going on, and there are many big names there that have come to Germany to talk about their titles, as well as the systems that they’re running on. For Xbox, they have a massive presence on the show floor and had many announcements during yesterday’s “Opening Night Live” event. Naturally, since they were there, they partook in some interviews to answer big questions from various sites. That included Phil Spencer talking with IGN on hardware and software topics. One of the biggest ones had to do with the “limitations” developers have to deal with on the Xbox Series X/S.

Despite both of them being next-gen in their own ways, numerous developers have had problems trying to make a high-quality version for the Xbox Series X and then “downgrading” it a bit so that it’ll function on the Xbox Series S. One of those developers was Larian Studios, who noted that during development of Baldur’s Gate 3 for the console, they had issues getting split screen to work on the Xbox Series S. When IGN asked about it, and whether developers will be allowed to focus on the more powerful console, Phil Spencer said the following:

“I want to decouple these issues a little bit. The decision to do split screen or not is a creative decision, a dev decision. So if we think about Forza, it has nothing to do with any kind of hardware thing on S and X, just where they wanted to focus their time.

In terms of the two platforms, I want games to launch on both platforms. There are feature differences between the platforms. We have an ability to kind of handle that and how it works. Where teams are going to choose to focus their time and their effort is up to them. We’re here to support them and what they want to go do.”

He further downplayed the “issue” in the latter parts of the interview, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to bring up the issue at all.

It’s not just Larian who has had issues taking games on the X at full power and then “making them work” on the S with lesser capabilities. Numerous games have been locked at 30 FPS on the systems versus 60 FPS because of the S and its limitations.

What Microsoft and Xbox do in the future is a mystery, but given past events, it’s fair to say that this won’t go away anytime soon.