With the Xbox One Scorpio due out next year, it is an exciting time to be following the console gaming market, no matter which side of the divide you fall on- whether you’re a customer or a developer o video games, the Scorpio is something that you want to keep your eyes on.
We do know how customers are responding to the hardware, and there seems to be some general excitement in the air about Microsoft’s purported ‘beast,’ the most powerful gaming console ever made- but how are developers, especially some of the smaller ones who now have an additional SKU for their game to potentially consider, taking the news?
GamingBolt recently had a sit down with Deck 13 Interactive’s CEO Jan Klose, and we decided to spring some questions on the Scorpio, and its potential implications for the larger console gaming market, as well as for developers specifically.
“Well you could just wrap things up if you’d like, and you can go in different directions: you can go for frame rate, you can go for resolution, or you can go for content,” Klose said, discussing what developers could do with the Scorpio’s hardware. “We don’t want to do two versions of the game for different consoles so we’re not likely going for content. We don’t know yet.”
All this said, he did note that he does not expect the Scorpio to outpace gaming PCs at all- which is a sentiment that most developers seem to agree on- the most powerful gaming console is just that, the most powerful gaming console. It still cannot match up to the best gaming PCs.
“I’m not so much the expert there, but I think teraflops are most likely superseded by high-speed PCs,” he said. “And if not today, then tomorrow. They are very fast.”
He also noted that he is not too worried about how much the Scorpio may cost, as the price on it is bound to come down eventually. “I think every new console generation where the greatest and fastest consoles ever created, they all drop down to a reasonable price. So I hope the same will happen here.”
As for launching The Surge on Scorpio? He wasn’t too keen on the idea, not for now, in any case. “For Scorpio, we don’t know yet, we have to see. The announcement is pretty new.”
Which is a pretty fair and reasonable position to take- after all, for smaller developers, avoiding the extra work load the Scorpio poses may yet be the best thing they can do. The Xbox One Scorpio is due for a launch in Holiday 2017.
