Series S owners getting both Starfield & Baldur's Gate this year oh the horror lol.

Let's fucking goooo

Not gonna lie, this sets a bad precedent about the presumed pairing between X & S now.  Because MS made an implicit promise that the only sacrifice made with Series S would be graphical fidelity back in 2020.  Chickens coming home to roost by skimping on RAM like they did.

No that's fine

But it's more about what it means for the future. Microsoft has/had parity between the two for a reason, because without it they know developers would quickly abandon trying to support Series S because it is extra work. You could see developers just not even bother trying to implement features into Series S (bigger than split-screen) because they aren't required to anymore.

Something as niche and irrelevant as split-screen shouldn't cause a block to release but I'd still hope that more essential features still have parity requirements between the two consoles otherwise this could get bad quickly for Series S owners. So I hope this is a unique case-by-case basis and not a total lift of the parity requirement.

Definitely fucked on the RAM.

Next time they do this (and they will) it should be the same RAM/CPU but a much weaker GPU.

Yep, they're getting the two best RPG's of the year, I think they'll be just fine, especially since so few use splitscreen these days anyway. 

Lotta the dooming and console warring looks a little silly at least now 👀

Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 in the same year...

I think they should aim for half the GPU power and the same RAM and CPU and SSD next gen if they do a budget console and a premium console at launch again. Not only did the lower RAM hurt S, but only having 1/3rd the GPU power is also hurting it with some devs, they'll be much better off going for half the GPU power next gen. Or better yet just doing one console on release and then a mid-gen Pro console and a slim version of the base console, like last gen. 

Microsoft: You can remove split screen on Series S because we don't give a shit about that either.

Honestly heard the split-screen for BG3 on PC is pretty bad anyway (performance wise).

They're probably also not done with Xbox Series specific optimization and bug fixes at this point, I'm guessing once it became evident that they couldn't get Series S splitscreen working before launch, they decided to pull pretty much all dev resources from the Xbox Series port until after PC and PS5 ports were released. Though the parity clause is gone for them now, it'll probably still take a month or two after the PS5 port releases to finish optimization and bug fixes specific to the Xbox Series consoles. So yeah, I think October release at the earliest is the most likely scenario, gives them time to finish the port and lets them steer well clear of Starfield.