People should be writing entire thesis on this bizarre, boneheaded, selfish and anti-consumer move but as the article says, games media like Digital Foundry downplayed concerns before devs finally came out and called this console a potato.
Everyone wants to be friends with CEOs in this industry. There is zero accountability. I have not seen anyone pick up the phone and ask Phil or Jason Ronald to comment on literally dozens of games that have shipped without ray tracing or 60 fps modes on the series s despite MS claiming parity of features in marketing this console. The gaming journalists are too busy focusing on developer crunch or diversity issues. Great, now can we also focus a little bit on the consumer?
Here is what I would love the journalists to cover:
- Why was this thing greenlit after devs trashed it for being too underpowered? DF had several sources before its reveal saying devs were vehemently against it.
- Were the devs concerns addressed and specs upgraded? If not, why did Phil and co. ship this thing knowing devs had massive concerns about supporting it.
- At what resolution does MS step in and say it is unacceptable for a console they advertised as a 1440p console. DF said Matrix demo dropped significantly below 533p. Metro was at 512p. What are their standards for games to pass certification? 480p? 360p?
- Why should XSX owners who paid $250 extra for their console be punished with a delay because of a console they did not buy.
- What is the sales split between the two consoles? How many xss users are going to be affected by this? Why keep the sales split a secret?
- What exactly are the devs concerns? RAM, GPU, both? Go off the record if you have to, but its very surprising how few articles have been written about this. Even this one sources twitter instead of reaching out to devs themselves.
- If the pricepoint was a key target then why not take the loss like console manufacturers did in the past instead of passing down the cost to unsuspecting buyers who may not know about RAM and tflops bottlenecks. As a trillion dollar company, surely they can afford $6 per GB of vram. Sony, MS, and Sega all used to take $100 losses on these consoles. Sony took $250 losses with the PS3 for the first two years. Why cant a company that can afford to pay $70 billion for activiision while making $40 billion in profits last year spend an extra $36 to ensure ram parity?