Microsoft’s Xbox One X is less than two months away but there are still many unanswered questions about it. How will the general population react to it? Will it help Microsoft’s Xbox One sales? Exclusives like Gears of War 4, Forza Motorsport 7, Halo 5: Guardians and so on will have either 4K patches or additional bells and whistles in the form of graphical enhancements. But how many developers will actually take full advantage of the console’s power?
Speaking to Steffen Kabbelgaard of betadwarf, which developed Minion Masters: Forced to Duel, we asked if the full potential of the Xbox One X would be utilized. Given how developers have to support the less powerful Xbox One as well, how difficult would it be?
Kabbelgaard replied, “Personally I expect many games to not use the full potential of the Xbox One X, just like most games run sub-optimally on the majority of PCs. With the consoles getting several versions the cost/gain from optimizing for the consoles becomes less efficient, meaning that optimizing for the weakest one and just letting the power of the stronger one make up for it will seem like a logical conclusion for a lot of teams.
“Especially the smaller teams that can’t afford to spend the time required to optimize for many different systems – and I think we fall in that category.” Which seems like a perfectly reasonable response. Either developers won’t have the resources to really push the Xbox One X version far beyond the Xbox One or there won’t be much return for optimizing on so many different versions. Depending on how successful the Xbox One X is, that could change but we’ll have to wait and see.
The Xbox One X is out on November 7th worldwide and will retail for $499.