Speaking with Gi.biz, Xbox boss Phil Spencer brushed off the opinion that Xbox Series X games will be “held back” by Microsoft’s development studios creating games that are also compatible with Xbox One.
Spencer likened cross-generation development to PC games, which have a diverse ecosystem when it comes to hardware. You have games that are powerful with the “highest fidelity” which will also “work across a set of hardware.”
“Frankly, held back is a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition,” said Spencer. “I just look at Windows. It’s almost certain if the developer is building a Windows version of their game, then the most powerful and highest fidelity version is the PC version. You can even see that with some of our first-party console games going to PC, even from our competitors, that the richest version is the PC version. Yet the PC ecosystem is the most diverse when it comes to hardware, when you think about the CPUs and GPUs from years ago that are there.
“Yes, every developer is going to find a line and say that this is the hardware that I am going to support, but the diversity of hardware choice in PC has not held back the highest fidelity PC games on the market. The highest fidelity PC games rival anything that anybody has ever seen in video games. So this idea that developers don’t know how to build games, or game engines, or ecosystems, that work across a set of hardware… there’s a proof point in PC that shows that’s not the case.”
