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The story
The president of game development company M2 was reported on 5ch’s hardware/industry (“Geha”) board for saying that Xbox’s subscription service “Game Pass” is a failure, and that the low-price “Xbox Series S” has become a ball and chain on hardware rollout. In the thread, posters raised technical points that Series S’s reduced memory (compared to Series X) makes it impossible to drop support, putting the burden on developers, and noted this is a different situation from the performance gap on Switch. On the other hand, some pointed out that Game Pass contract payouts have helped studios recoup development costs, so opinion was split on whether it can really be called a failure.
What people said
That's positioned more as a higher-end GPU refresh for existing PS users — developers don't even have to support the Pro enhancements if they don't want to.
What makes Xbox Series S the worst is that devs have no choice but to support it, yet its memory spec differs from Series X — game content loading ends up bottlenecked by the S.
If it could just reject games outright like an underpowered PC, it wouldn't be hated nearly this much.
This really is peak "Chikan-brain" energy lol
Now that cross-platform releases (PC included) are the norm, it probably isn't that much of a ball and chain anymore anyway
On PC it's fine if a game just doesn't run on low-end specs — if Series S were allowed to do the same, it wouldn't be a ball and chain either
The middle-aged guys in this industry never shake off their childishness.
They're always going on about "games for grown-ups" but can't practice it themselves
The reason Stalker 2 recouped its development costs within days of launch was the Game Pass Day One contract payout
Tango Gameworks proudly bragged about Hi-Fi Rush and Ghostwire: Tokyo hitting 5 million players on Game Pass — and then the whole studio got shut down anyway
Switch's handheld mode just drops the GPU clock speed from docked mode — everything else is the same.
Series S, on the other hand, actually has less memory than Series X.
For developers, that difference is huge
With Switch, developers have no choice but to support it whether they like it or not — but Xbox just doesn't sell
Given how much semiconductor prices have spiked lately, that's not such a bad choice.
Packing in 24GB or 32GB of GDDR7 doesn't even fit Pro-tier pricing anymore.
Basically, they just need to match the console's memory spec to whatever the "PSP3" uses
Rejecting that approach is more like a dark chapter for the game industry itself
They're still charging straight toward the cliff.
Probably won't stop until the graphics workload triggers a massive round of layoffs
That makes no sense.
That argument would hold up if Series S were actually cheap — do you even know its price?
As a strategy to spread Game Pass, it wasn't the wrong call.
But he's saying the painful part is that Game Pass itself turned out to be a failure
So Game Pass really was a failure after all
Why doesn't Valve, which has the Deck and the Machine, say "you must support Deck/Machine to release on Steam"?
And because of that, they don't guarantee everything actually runs
Outside of subcontract work, M2 hasn't released a single game on this generation's Xbox
Objectively speaking, Xbox Series X's hardware design and service lineup were way better than PS5's.
Such a waste that they self-destructed by doing one weird thing after another
Series S also ended up acting as a kind of bridge to Switch 2.
It sits in this oddly precise spot: Series S > Switch 2 > Xbox One X.
Re: #70 So down the line, it might actually turn out to be an annoyance for the PS side too
And M2 clearly understands that well
Somebody go buy Chikan's FH6, it's only sold 1,401 copies lol
Don't start throwing sales numbers around, you beggar — Wolverine only did 22k copies!!
No wonder users keep dwindling, retailers are pulling out, and Xbox being left out in the cold isn't going away either lol
This is the hardware that even the world-renowned Kojima fled from — did you really think it was well-liked?
Background and Discussion Points on This Topic
At launch, Xbox Series S was designed on the premise that it would simultaneously support the same generation of games as Series X, but its memory is only 10GB versus Series X’s 16GB, and the amount actually usable for development is even smaller. The thread’s point about “different memory specs” refers to this, and there’s a technical nuance here — it’s a different situation from Switch, where the handheld/docked difference is limited to GPU clock speed. Also, since Game Pass isn’t a one-time purchase but recoups development costs through flat subscription contract payouts, it’s hard to call it an outright failure based on unit sales alone, and the thread indeed cited examples like Stalker 2 recouping costs through contract money. On the other hand, Tango Gameworks, maker of Hi-Fi Rush and Ghostwire: Tokyo, had publicized strong Game Pass numbers, yet the studio was shut down anyway — a contradiction where high play counts don’t guarantee business continuity, which is also part of the backdrop to this discussion.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “[Tragic News] M2 President Declares Game Pass a Failure and Xbox Series S a Ball and Chain.”
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