Ryuu96 said:
In an interview with Business Insider, Phil states that the company is focused on one console even though last year he said consoles. He joked that technically Microsoft did launch a new console last year and Scarlett does make two, but anyone who was watching the event and following interviews knows that he was referring to multiple next-gen consoles. Talking with various people inside and outside of Microsoft, here is my best conclusion as to why the device was removed from the roadmap. First, developers were having a harder than expected time creating next-generation games that spanned across two systems with various specs. As you might expect, developers were putting a focus on making games that would run well on the lower-end device first and then scaling them up to the higher-speced, Anaconda. Keep in mind, it’s easier to scale up than it is to scale down. Because of this, next-gen Xbox games would be at performance and visual disadvantage which is not what Microsoft would like to see as it starts to go head-to-head with the next generation PlayStation. I’m not the only one hearing this, Digital Foundry, speaking with people at E3, have heard this too. But that may not be the only reasons. The purpose of Lockhart was to make it easier to join the Xbox family with a console that was priced much lower than it’s a bigger brother, Anaconda. With the progress made on xCloud and its ability to bring high quality, low latency gaming to any device, Lockhart started to become more of an obstacle for Microsoft. https://www.thurrott.com/xbox/208837/microsoft-shifts-xbox-focus-to-one-next-gen-console |
Ok, I'm not a developer and I know next to nothing about game development but I just can't get my head around this concept.
I mean, how adding features to an existing game (like, high-quality shadows, lightning, textures, more polygons, raytracing, HDR, etc etc) could be any easier than just disabling them once they are already in place?
