Summary
TheXbox Series Sis not holding back the current generation of consoles, according to Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke. The Belgian company recently ran into some issues while porting its upcoming RPG to the Xbox Series S, which iswhy the Xbox version ofBaldur’s Gate 3is still without a release date.
While the more affordable counterpart to the Xbox Series X offers impressive value for money, some studios have so far found that targeting its modest specs is a substantial development challenge. Based on the imperfect teraflops metric denoting how many trillions of floating point operations a given system can perform per second, theXbox Series S(4 TFLOPS) is roughly three times less powerful than the Series X (12.1 TFLOPS).
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Yet Vincke believes that thisdifference in specs between the Xbox Series S and Series Xhas been way overblown, having said as much in a recent interview with Skill Up. Asked whether the Xbox Series S is somehow holding back gaming, theBaldur’s Gate 3boss outright dismissed that notion, stating that Microsoft’s less powerful console simply requires “development effort.” Seeing how Larian started out as a CRPG-only studio, the company is used to making sure that its games work on a wide variety of configurations, the industry veteran explained.
Vincke hence doesn’t see the Xbox Series S as any more burdensome to support than something like the Steam Deck, which is even less powerful than Microsoft’s most affordable current-gen console. For context, Larian already confirmed that it’sworking on makingBaldur’s Gate 3Steam Deck-compatible, although the game isn’t expected to have a “Steam Deck Verified” status on day one.
As part of the same interview, Vincke also revealed that the vast majority of current-gen Xbox owners bought the Series S instead of Series X. Microsoft said that the total sales of the two systems reached 21 million units in late June, which, combined with the Larian CEO’s newly shared insight, puts the Series S installed base in the eight-digit territory.
Vincke’s comments on the Xbox Series S stand in stark contrast to some other veteran developers' recent takes on the console. Back in late 2022, a seniorRocksteady official said the Xbox Series S is going to hold back this entire generation of games, which has been a somewhat frequently reiterated sentiment ever since Microsoft unveiled its latest consoles. And while the developer opinions on the matter remain fairly polarizing, Vincke’s positive take on the system is still an important vote of confidence for the Xbox Series S because it comes from an entirely independent developer instead of a Microsoft subsidiary like Bethesda or Tango Gameworks, both of whom defended the console in the past.
