There are more Series S than Series X. This is impossible to let down the Series S owners.
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Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?
- Thread starter invictis
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There are more Series S than Series X. This is impossible to let down the Series S owners.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
The whole "S doesn't have enough memory" thing is bunk. You can play any game available for the X on the S instead with 99% feature parity. They've proven that after hundreds of game releases the S has enough memory to do what it's intended purpose is: Provide a cost effective entry into the Xbox ecosystem at reduced image fidelity.
If X/S is 50/50 in the US by 2024, that means that the S was likely a very good idea for MS. Some people can't seem to accept this.
A lot of people are panicking around here. MS sold almost 8 million consoles this year. They are on pace to get to 50-60 million units by 2027 as planned.
Sony had an amazing year after they solved their production woes. There was a lot of pent-up demand from the supply shortage years.
MS just spent $100 billion on 40 studios and needs to stay focused on the games: Get those 6 AAA games onto GP and PC every year. Then just shadow Sony on hardware with a better machine a year later every time Sony brings a new one out. Put the S into an M handheld. Expand xCloud as the technology improves. Trying to beat Sony at Sony's game is a fools errand. Sell the S for $200 and the X for $399, each with 3 months of GP. They'll make all the losses back in a couple years if they do this and lock more people into GP.
If X/S is 50/50 in the US by 2024, that means that the S was likely a very good idea for MS. Some people can't seem to accept this.
A lot of people are panicking around here. MS sold almost 8 million consoles this year. They are on pace to get to 50-60 million units by 2027 as planned.
Sony had an amazing year after they solved their production woes. There was a lot of pent-up demand from the supply shortage years.
MS just spent $100 billion on 40 studios and needs to stay focused on the games: Get those 6 AAA games onto GP and PC every year. Then just shadow Sony on hardware with a better machine a year later every time Sony brings a new one out. Put the S into an M handheld. Expand xCloud as the technology improves. Trying to beat Sony at Sony's game is a fools errand. Sell the S for $200 and the X for $399, each with 3 months of GP. They'll make all the losses back in a couple years if they do this and lock more people into GP.
MS is on the road to sold 6 to 6.5 millions console only this year. They aren't at all on the pace to sold 50 to 60 millions but 35 to 40 millions consoles.
The Series X will catch up, if MS was able to deliver more Series X and without console shortage, the Series S would probably have sold much less.
cheapchips
Veteran
I doubt there's any Xbox purchaser buying the S while they wait for the X to become available, but could be wrong. If the S's are passed on then that's really not an issue for MS.
The scenario where Playstation waiters pick up a S works for MS too. Those customers are now Xbox/Gamepass customers.
Both scenarios depend on Gamepass or MS first party delivering to retain engagement.
Sony sold more than 2 times more PS5 than Microsoft sold Xbox Series and I suppose end of generation they will have sold between 3 to 4 times more PS5 than Xbox Series.
Discount was working very well at the beginning of the month but it begin to slow down because the demand begin to dry up. And this is US, in rest of the world this is much worse...
Gamepass is plateauing around 30 millions subscriptions like a few years before PS plus plateau reach around 48 millions subscriptions. The problem of Gamepass is subscription have a ceiling and PC gamers prefer buy their game on Steam.
Satya Nadella understood the Gamepass ceiling
And PC gamer like to buy their game. And from the leak of ABK trial Gamepass forecast begin to be missed because Gamepass PC number are low.
Just after the september result and the number of Starfield sales and impact on Gamepass.
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I think the Series S is a great little machine, and that MS's problems come from something other than having a more accessibly priced machine. The memory thing is a real problem though.
For gamers it only means S users having degraded assets and maybe the odd feature like RT modes cut out, but for developers it can be quite an issue. Developers (good ones) have variously described crashing devkits, having to make custom assets, additional engineering steps, and making choices that may impact other platforms. It makes the S take a bigger bite out of development resources than it needed to.
If I were MS and in second place to Sony (an increasingly distant one now), and I had just introduced a second lower end machine that developers were not thrilled about, I would at least want to make supporting that additional machine as easy as possible. The S can support fantastic versions of demanding games, but for a just few dollars per machine averaged over the life of the platform (a single extra 2GB GDDR6 chip) they could have made it simpler to develop for and also increased the quality of final games for users. They are, after all, paying the same amount for the games.
1) The vast, vast majority of games so far have been cross-gen games. Of course Series S is fine with these.
2) The criticism isn't necessarily that Series S cant play next gen titles, it's that it's adding a bunch of extra work and headache for developers that it shouldn't have if Microsoft had better spec'd the memory setup. The whole intent of Series S was supposed to be that you'd get the exact same games as Series X, just with a lower resolution, and for devs, it'd be equally as simple, just turning down the resolution and bam, done.
Because anything else would be a problem. Devs already have too much on their plate. We know this, we've seen this, it's been a huge issue. Even with games taking like 4-5+ years now, it's still not enough time in most cases, as games keep getting released with lots of issues. The last thing devs needed was having to do a bunch of extra work to reduce memory demands enough to work on Series S.
If anything, Microsoft and Sony should have been working to create LESS work for developers wherever possible. Sony seems to have done a decent job of this as it seems PS5 is incredibly easy to develop for, but Microsoft have made it so that developers now have THREE target platforms to work for, each often requiring multiple different flavors of quality/performance modes.
Basically, Series S is just making life more difficult for developers. We know that if there's enough will and resources, you can scale games down quite a lot. Witcher 3 running on Switch is a great example. But that was an optional thing the devs decided to do cuz there was a potential financial upside in selling on a whole new platform. Forcing devs to have to make things work on Series S is just an annoyance that they HAVE to do if they want to release on Xbox at all, and they get no extra monetary reward for doing this extra work.
It's a failure of the brief.
davis.anthony
Veteran
Which has changed from the original intention of doing everything graphically that XSX does, just at a lower resolution.
How many XSS games are missing RT when XSX has it?
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
I can acknowledge that even though the consumer experience has been very good with the S, it likely would have been a good idea for it to have had an extra 2GB of RAM, but how difficult that has been for devs isn't something we can know from media reports.
50-50
The sales were roughly half mid this year but that was because X had several stock outs since launch. Demand for the S is quite low compared to the X. With more stock of the X available now this figure is going to change moving forward. I think by end of the gen it will be at least 60% Series X.
Exactly, I have never seen the Series S out of stock anywhere since launch. I also think with Brooklin coming out next year they'll be able to sell more units and increase gamepass subscriber growth.
As soon as devs got the devkits they were complaining about the memory on the S. Time that would have been spent optimizing for the X was spent dealing with memory issues on the S. For one there was no Series S devkit, MSFT wanted devs to use the Series X devkit with a virtual instance of the Series S and this didnt work out when the actual games were tested on the S. Up until last year MSFT was providing updates to provide more memory(how this was done? I think reducing size of OS and optimizing virtual memory space) for the S. You can read about a recent update here.
100% spot on. Console requirements are stricter. I think people misunderstand because they see games being released on PC as well as console not knowing PC doesnt have as strict requirements. Its why when Larian tried to "PC" the Series S version of BG3 MSFT complained and worked with them so split screen didnt play like on low spec PC. But as to your point, it was extra work and delayed the game. We're starting to see games designed around the 14GB available memory on the PS5 and Series X. A good example is GTA 6 is certainly going to run well on all the consoles(especially now that they are releasing console only first) but I'm sure the devs will enjoy more spending time on the PS5 pro to hit 60 fps than time spent trying to optimize memory for the S. The game is going to be designed around the 14GB of RAM available for the PS5/PS5 pro and X. So its going to need extra work to get it to work on the S.
That's for the game and graphics - yes?
It is 13.5 GB on Xbox Series X and 12.5 GB on PS5 at launch.
Yes. Actual figure is 13.5GB on the Series X, I remember reading it was 14GB on the PS5 but it could be lower than this
Sure officially there is 13.5GB of available memory but beware as it's more complicated than that. Some devs have problems on XSX supposedly because there is only 10GB of fast memory.
Yes I have heard of this, its not a major issue but I can see how refactoring code written for the PS5 could cause issues when porting over to the Series X. You dont want functions/taks which require higher memory bandwidth in the lower performance memory of 3.5GB. They shouldnt have gone with a tiered memory performance structure in reality. Should have been 16GB at 560GB/s. But I dont think a studio like Rockstargames will have any issue with this at all.
So if the game needs 8gb the there's only 5.5gb of vram left for graphics - Sort of blows that "you should get a graphics card with 16gb because that's what the consoles have" argument out of the water (which I've been guilty of using)
PC are good with 12 GB is VRAM. This is enough. I would say 10 GB is enough but I think about corner case and I think about Direct storage games where a buffer will be needed for compressed Asset in VRAM.
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