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potato_hamster on 02 March 2016
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TheMessiah said:
potato_hamster said:

It hurts gamers. It segments Microsofts userbase. You no longer have "Xbox users". You have "Xbox 1A users", "Xbox 1B users", and "Xbox 1C users". Every game will run differently on every console, multiplayer will need to be balanced to account for these differences. Users then have to worry about whether a new Xbox 1 game will be compatible with their Xbox 1, especially if their X1 is 2 or 3 hardware generations old.

It hurts developers. Every single hardware specification will need to be QAed as if it were a seperate console. Every single one. This will drive up development costs. PC games are not going to "just work" on X1. They will have to be reworked to work on X1, and then QAed which means the PC while, while looking the same, will have games not found on the X1 store and vice versa. Also, if the store fronts were to be unified, it would mean that they lose on on every user that would have bought a copy of a game both on PC and X1.

I can pretty much guarantee that every single person that thinks this is a great idea has zero idea what its like to make a video game, much less a console video game. It is radically different than most people imagine, and people have absolutely no clue how much time, moeny and effort is put into QA. It's a huge deal to increase that cost.

But noone will be segmented. V1A can play all the games v1B can play. And play multiplayer with them to. Its exactly the same console but with better specs. Right down to the Os being exactly the same.

Theres already many videos from developers showing a game built in Windows 10 ecosystem running on PC, then in less than 24 hours running on Xbox One and even Mobile. We have known for over 2 years from developer conferences and multiplatform devs that designing games for Windows 10 and Direct x12 makes game design across platforms far far easier.

Its a unified platform. For example see this video from a developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzZaGdxARyw

 

 

  

Can V1A games play all games V1C games? No, maybe some but not all. That's an enormous problem. Maybe multiplayer can work, but if V1B users have a fundamental advantage because they're playing at 60 fps and V1A users are playing at 30 fps, then again, that's an enormous problem. That's why when you have competitive gaming competitions, everyone plays on spec PCs. They don't bring their own.

Also "running on" and "running acceptably" could be months and months and months of work. I worked on porting a PS3 game to the PS Vita before the Vita was released and the developer kits and tools weren't finalized. We had the game "running on" the vita within a couple months, running at less than 1 frame per second, but it was technically running. It took another 6 before we had the game at a level that was "playable" (about 20 fps), and another 2 before we had the game running at 28 fps. See optimization, and tweaks to account for things like different screen resolutions, control inputs, etc. all take time, and they all need to be done. Also there's a vast difference between porting a simple pacman clone and porting say, Halo 5 to work on a tablet.