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Pemalite said:
Kyuu said:

Series S is 25%-35% the real world "power" of the much more popular counterpart and the inevitable industry standard, the PS5. Digital Foundry is already calling for Microsoft to stop mandating it, which is what I predicted before the generation started and got accused of "console warring" for it. Some of the same people who defended and glorified this thing will thank Microsoft for ditching it as a requirement down the road. Mandating it would only lead to more "moneyhatted" PS5 exclusives. The "power doesn't matter" crowd are in for a rude awakening. Microsoft isn't Nintendo and Xbox isn't a hybrid.

On the flip side, Switch 2's existence may future proof Series S to some extent, since its GPU power is rumoured to be around that level. In other words, some developers won't think "Series S is holding us back for a small return" but rather think "Series S and Switch 2 have too large of a combined active install base to ignore." In that sense, Series S and Switch 2 might assist each other.

Regardless, if Series S remains mandated all gen, expect more games to skip Xbox altogether in a similar fashion to PS4 games skipping Switch 1. Also expect a lot of horribly optimized games that just exist to meet Microsoft's on paper requirements. A Cyberpunk 2077 galore.

The Series S likely sits just below the Radeon RX 6500XT in terms of capability.
It has more single precision FP, Texture fillrate and bandwidth than the 6400, but less pixel fillrate.

It's basically lowest-tier discreet GPU capability. Still better than the One X.

I do think the Series S needs to stick around for the entire generation, developers just need to make deeper cuts to their game to shoehorn them on the console, it is possible, just takes some extra development time.
I would also like to see the Series S get a revision to increase the internal SSD size and potentially add a Bluray drive or release an external Bluray drive.

The Series S is Microsoft's best selling console this generation, it's also the cheapest next-gen console, so they do need to keep that around and capitalise on it, especially as many people start to tighten belts due to economic uncertainty.

I think the first generation Series S will be dropped (as a mandated SKU) in favor of a more powerful Series S+ (hopefully 75% more powerful, 12GB of RAM, bigger SSD). Unless Series S succeeds in appealing to a very large non-gamer or non-console-gamer demographic, I'd rather it not be mandated, because it would suck to see the more ambitious games in the early to mid 2030's being held back by Series S tech. It's bad enough that we're still stuck to Xbox One specs in the in early 2020's thanks to crossgen overstaying its welcome. I want the minimum spec to have as high a floor as economically possible. Series S can still get a ton of support without the need of being mandated, because the Switch 2 exists and it's going to be huge.

The reason Series S is the best selling Xbox is because the X isn't being produced in large enough volumes.

My primary concern with the S is that we're probably getting mid-gen upgrades in a few years. Mid-gen upgrades will allow developers to go crazier with games, that even Series X and PS5 will often struggle at sub 1080p/40 fps. There would be a limit to how much a developer can scale back on Series S before it gets ridiculous (challenging, unplayable, costly, time wasting, etc).