There you have it folks, Xbox Series X games will not be held back from Xbox One and that's what Phil says!

Taken from IGN: Phil Spencer Says Xbox Series X Games Aren't Being Held Back By Xbox One

Phil Spencer has played down the idea that Xbox Series X games will be held back from their full potential by having to be playable on Xbox One, pointing to the success of PC games at working across wide ranges of hardware power as evidence. Speaking to GamesIndustry, the Xbox boss called the idea of games being held back "a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition." Instead, Spencer points to the PC market, where games that are regularly touted as the most advanced versions across all platforms can also be played on lower-powered hardware:

"I just look at Windows", Spencer explained. "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."

Spencer's wider point is that advanced games can be created that don't also cut out a section of the existing playerbase: "We should applaud load times and fidelity of scenes and framerate and input latency, and all of these things that we've focused on with the next generation. But that should not exclude people from being able to play. That's our point. How do we create an ecosystem where if you want to play an Xbox game, we're going to give you a way to go play it?"

"As a player, you are the center of our strategy," Spencer adds later in the interview. "Our device is not the center of our strategy, our game is not the center of the strategy. We want to enable you to play the games you want to play with, with the friends you want to play with, on any device. On TV, the Xbox console is going to be the best way to play console games. Xbox Series X is the most powerful console out there and it will have absolutely the best versions of our console games. But that's not to exclude other people from being able to play."

Spencer also adds that he's playing cross-gen games on his Xbox Series X and that he does feel a change in quality: "I'm playing it every day at home, and it is different from playing on an Xbox One X."

The choice to allow for true next-gen exclusives is one of the most notable points of difference between Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. While Xbox has committed to the idea that its first-party games will be playable across generations, Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan has specifically said that he's uninterested in making PS5 games run on PS4 hardware.

“We believe that when you go to all the trouble of creating a next-gen console," Ryan explained, "that it should include features and benefits that the previous generation does not include. And that, in our view, people should make games that can make the most of those features.”

That's what the man says. I mean what he's saying is technically correct but also he's just saying these games will work and play on lower-end machines, such as XB1S or PS4 slim. But just like using a 4/5 years old GPU on PC, you can play 2020 games sure, you just will do it low resolution (900p-1080P) and low settings.

I like the idea in theory, but I guess the question is, where do they draw the line? At some point in the next generation, the base level Xbox One will not be able to handle what a developer working on an Xbox game is trying to accomplish, and will the develop be able to move forward without an Xbox One version, or will they be held back by the limitations of the old hardware?

I believe Xbox is trying to position themselves more like smartphones than consoles at this point, where everything works on everything, but at a certain point, the oldest version of that device gets phased out. The real question is, does that line exist, and when do they cross over it?

Citing PC, minimum specs tend to hover in the same general area for most a generation, but at a certain point, your PC just won't be able to run new games and you have to upgrade. How will Xbox handle that when the time comes?

It is always up to developers to decide where their cut of is going to be. This notion of being held back was always a myth as far as I am concern. Prior to Xbox supporting their current systems for 1 or 2 years, console gamers were all onboard notion that consoles weren't holding back gaming with post using gifs of how much better console games look blah blah blah. But then Sony said they were going to only make PS5 games and the chorus changed. 😂

Consoles and PCs have been running on the same tech for the past 7 years. This notion of being held back, died ages ago. Also the idea that tech is not scalable is just silly. We have enough examples of this fallacy being broken with Switch supported games such as The Witcher 3, Doom and Bioshock. Yes, they run like shit but it didn't prevent the strong hardware from running it better. Even when I had the WiiU as a platform to develop for, I was forced to refactor my code to make it more performant. At no point in the development was the game design changed for the weaker system. In addition that the refactoring of the code benefited the stronger systems be default.

So, all of this hoopla is just that. Noise. Game developers have spent most of their time pushing graphics, which is the most scalable aspect of a game. But, we have been playing the same damn games for decades despite the generational upgrade and this upcoming gen is the smallest upgrade yet, but people are supposedly concerned about being held back. 🙄

You are acting as if their strategy is to support their current systems indefinitely when a timeframe has been stated. Now if you are talking about the rumored Series S, then they will have to support for the rest of its cycle.

Been the case for years on PC, when not on console.

Blah blah blah. This guys does too many interviews and is constantly contradicting himself. Just stfu and make good games.

And despite all of that, you made him your avatar and your name.

Full of lies. Storage isn't scalable for starters, all old tech will limit what a new gen can do to some extent. Let's hear the MS defenders.

Phil has spoken.

Now we can all rest easy.

Games aren't being held back by Xbox One....

PC games minimum/recommended are above the Jaguar from circa 2011. This and slow ass DDR3 will be bottlenecks for MS. So yes XSX will be held back.

I don’t think games will be held back either.

@nfamouslegend: ddr3 will be a bottleneck for consoles with ddr3. Obviously.

Don't be so gullible. This is pure damage control due to not pushing next-gen exclusives early on. The Jaguar CPU already holds back games on current gen. This is just embarrassing by Phil.

@BassMan: I think it’ll all be fine. I might right, I might be wrong but I’m not too worried about it.

How does it hold back games?

Uh oh. Pedro's triggered.

People bitch about this, just like everything else, but he's right. At the start of every gen the difference between new and old is minimal, and the best looking games always end up at the end of any generation.

Having accessibility early on is the best move you could make, along with bc.

Let's see what happens. I'm remaining skeptical.

You can do better than that.

Because of course he's going to say that. Uncle Phil is the father of all lies and tricks.

Uh, that entire post was written asking if a timeline had been stated, which can be assumed to mean that I didn't know if they had stated if one existed. I'm not acting like anything. Chill dude.

“the Xbox boss called the idea of games being held back "a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition”

In other words

Clueless fannyboys with a ps or a pc Trying to damage control,because the series X causing sleepless nights

HaH

We gotta situation on our hands here.

Two years support for Xbox One, I believe.

To add to what I said a minute ago, the power is there even at the xbox one X level for talented devs to make great looking games. They've achieved a threshold of capability that is satisfactory for a large majority of console gamers, so this is a non-issue for 99% that group.

The fact he'd even say some bullshit like that means he's reading too many message boards and getting caught up in device competition in the first place. The motherfucker lets ResetEra make all his business decisions for him. 🤣

Seems like you are the one who needs to chill, since you took my comment as a personal attack. 😎

Time for you to return to your VR space.

Good idea.

Did you get around to playing Alyx?

If you look at ps5's headline launch title, its obvious that better and bigger games are ahead. Spiderman-ish is a ps4 game upscaled for ps5...if Sony want to lose potential income from ps4 owners despite the game being able to run on ps4, how is that smarter than what ms are doing?

Yeah. Not my setup, but yeah. Felt a little "training wheel-ish" in terms of the depth of functionality, but an awesome game nonetheless.

That's one of the many problems with new Sony: they think like old Nintendo. What I mean by that is they think the power of their scloosives will overcome all else.

You're absolutely right: it's ignorant of Sony to gate off games like you mentioned by thinking their brand recognition is that strong and the user base will do whatever they tell them to do, no matter the inconvenience or expense.

Really? the jaguar holds back every aspect of game design and even the hardware of the refreshed consoles...... PS4 Pro patches showed only a slight increase in uncapped frame rates with older titles from the PS4 which only averaged 6-10 fps more..... that's tied to the CPU clock increase which was 31% higher than base ps4. Even though GPU power had more than doubled in the Pro.

So it holds back only framerate?

Phil setting up the lemmings for the inevitable lackluster sales for the XboxSex.

"Our device is not the center of our strategy, our game is not the center of the strategy"

Let that sink in filthy lemmings.....

TLHBO

Phil Spencer

Not only frame rate, but the technical scope of the game. You know this already though.

No, not just framerates, but the whole game itself. Respectfully consider that when the Xbox 360 to Xbox One gen started Monolith said they couldn't do the Nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor on last-gen systems, it just was not feasible on the hardware. So the 360 port of Shadow of Mordor was terrible, it was basically an entirely different game, same goes for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. This is an example of how I fear some games will have to be severely compromised for old-gen versions. Could this be the case for Halo: Infinite from Xbox One to XSX case? We'll have to wait and see.

It's exactly why RE8 was cutting PS4 and XB1 versions, Capcom basically hinted with their ambitions for next-gen design, they would have had to almost build two different games, and I don't mean adjusting graphics settings and resolution, or putting a 30fps cap on the last-gen version, I mean actually change the core game design flow. This is what Bassman is referring to the Jaguar cause it holds everything back.

@davillain-: it really is amazing how much detail you have to go into to explain to a supposed “developer” why there are clear situations where the xbone would hamper future game creation.

You know you got him triggered when he’s acting obtuse

There is a difference between a game being held back and a game running like shit on older systems. In both of your examples the version of the game on the stronger system wasn't held back. The version of the game that was held back was on the weaker system. Everyone is parroting the same message but I don't see any basis for the claims. Ray tracing doesn't exist on consoles yet we have a game like Control with full ray tracing on PC despite there being a console version. We have examples of several games that were design for current gen but we back ported to the Switch, the weakest console on the market that is barely stronger than last gen. So again, what is being held back? Currently the only valid argument that can be made is that release date of a game might be delayed or developers couldn't be bother with the extra expense of supporting older hardware. Both are fine complaints. But the game being held back? Nope!

When you been a PC gamer for a decade, you tend to learn more and more about gaming hardware and where it's going. Gaming is my passion, I'll just say Phil is either lying or just not tech-savvy enough.

Phil is plenty tech savvy. He is just doing damage control defending the cross-gen strategy.

I really doubt devs will use the power of next gen systems to do anything interesting, particularly multiplats... so I don't see the old xb1 being much of an issue.

I thought we weren't listening to corporate guys. Isn't that why you guys are still calling PS5 9tf despite Cerny saying it's 10.3?

You saying that a version of a game wasn't held back the weaker system is just dumb because of the fact that all current consoles are using the same cpu architecture, same amount of cores etc. The only real difference is a slightly higher core clock...... Game design have been and are being held back by the limits of the jaguar cpu of all these current consoles...... Everything from AI to physics has to designed around the limits of the cpu. All multiplatform games are designed around the lowest common denominator ie consoles..... It does not matter if a game gets a PC centric feature like Ray tracing or better graphics the design is limited by what the consoles can do to begin with.

Witcher 3 had to put limits on the number of NPC's on screen on both the PS4 and X1 at any given time, because of the cpu limits. 75 on consoles and 225 on PC. Just Cause 3 physics bludgeoned the console cpu's where the frame rate moved wildly. This why they put a 30 fps cap on the 4th game. And yet fps can still dip into the 20's with lots of physics based destruction going on.

Look at Alien isolation where that game barely maintains 30 fps, but yet on PC with a stronger cpu and much weaker gpu than PS4 was able to give similar experience as PS4.....

Hell DICE with BF games and 64-player multiplayer with the cpu of the consoles have caused sub par 60 fps experience. Bungie locked Destiny 2 to 30 fps because of the cpu limits cause performance on large player counts.

“[The CPU] is a biggest shortcoming for us,” Zeljko Kos, CTO of Little Green Men Games, said. “Starpoint Gemini Warlords is an optimized game in contrast to Starpoint Gemini 2, but the sheer number of ships and the gameplay scope can make a massive load on the CPU. We didn’t want to cut the gameplay on Xbox One, so we had to use some tricks and heavy optimizations in order to reduce CPU load. Additionally, our main thread is overloaded, which brings issues in big fights; i.e. when you have 100 ships fighting each other. That’s why we are still working on optimizations.”

If you think that these cpus aren't holding game design, why are Sony and MS going with cpu's with magnitudes higher performance, and off loading certain cpu tasks to custom chips.....

Its not just about game performance but limits in game sizes, physics,AI, and the lack of complexity of the games in general.

Have faith my friend. We are all in for a treat next-gen. We will be seeing more innovation and evolution next-gen than this current gen without a doubt.

So, you use The Witcher 3 as an example and in your example you are demonstrating that the game scaled based on the hardware validating the point I was making. You then use Just Cause 3 and 4 both were downgraded for the weaker systems and the compromises you mentioned was not placed on the PC. Another thing that is validating what I stated earlier.

You continue with Alien Isolation which ran better on the stronger system countering you claim yet again that the game was being held back.

Then you add BF which is capped at 64 player online. A restriction that can be removed effortless on stronger hardware. If you playing on a weaker system the cap is 64 and stronger 128 or how many much more the developer desires.

Destiny 2 is capped at 30 FPS on consoles but not on more capable PCs. More evidence countering you held back claim.

Then you provided more evidence of the game not being held back but developers being force to optimize the game to work within the scope of the hardware. As shown in the bold the design was not compromised they just created a more efficient game. You didn't realize that all of this fits into the point that the games aren't held back by supporting weaker hardware. The scope of the game remains the same and compromises are made on the weaker systems if any.

Absolutely none of your examples demonstrated the game design being held back but instead compromises in to visuals to facilitate the game design. Which is how games are developed. You have a design and you work on making the design work through whatever technical hurdles you encounter. The factor that affects game design the most is actual gameplay feedback and rarely hardware limitations.

Please don't parrot the same old game

• game size (games worlds are stupendously large making this argument void)
• physics (very scalable technology from mobile to high end PCs)
• AI (also scalable from mobile to high end PCs)
• complexity, feel free to share a game design that is too complex to run on consoles. I am very interested in the scenario

I feel that I am just arguing with people who just play games and haven't had any experience in actual game development. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯