It seems some big and small publishers aren’t sure if they should keep porting games to Xbox consoles
Reportedly, some third-party video game publishers aren’t sure why they should keep making and supporting games for Xbox consoles due to poor sales in Europe.
Microsoft’s biggest mistake was making the S and not going all in on the X. Having two hardware specs makes developers lives so much harder and leaves a big chunk of the console base with poor specs you have to optimise the hell out of your build for. Whereas Sony put a single target platform in everyone’s hands.
Because it actually fits on a shelf, it's way quieter, and can be thrown in a backpack if you want to take it places.
Those are the things I miss after upgrading from the S to the X.
Also "why not get an X and not use disks".... Well why pay double if you don't need to use disks? The performance difference isn't huge except on a few games made to utilize the X.
If there was no S then all games would have been optimized to the Xs level. Instead the S is compare able to the older Series X. The smaller form factor vs the mini fridge is basically the only thing going for it.
Indeed, a lot of people seem to only show awareness that the S doesn’t have a disc drive with no mention of how the S has a lower clock speed on the CPU, a 3x slower GPU, and 6GB less memory.
As a developer, those two SKUs are wildly different and are effectively different consoles. To have a smaller install base and multiple hardware specs, I can totally understand why developers are eager to give up on Xbox (I wonder how many devs had to write specific shaders for the S since the compute speed is so much slower).
Sony only differed SKUs on disc drive alone (which makes a lot of sense since even the people in this thread seem to have made their purchase of an S primarily on that feature).
It feels like I am paying for parts that I won’t use and may be a point of failure. Also the drive is taking up space. The entire unit may be smaller without it.
Moving parts are the bane of engineering; introducing a lot of risk into the equation. It's why we want to move off hard disc drives to SSDs. It's also electronics waste to buy a component you're not using.