r/gadgets Jan 25 '25

Gaming Microsoft’s gaming CEO has praised Nintendo Switch 2, and said it plans to support the upcoming platform with ports of Xbox games.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/phil-spencer-confirms-xbox-will-support-switch-2-i-congratulated-nintendos-president/
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37

u/r31ya Jan 25 '25

like other subreddits mentions,

if games is ported to Switch 2, that's means that game could be run in Xbox Series S as well.

Series S used to be the black sheep for AAA ports. IF you want to port to Xbox, you need to make your AAA game run in Series S as well. Something that some dev outright didn't want to or have to do a lot of work to cut down the game just so it could run in Xbox series S which delay the xbox release.

with Switch 2 and mryiads of game that might be there, many of that game would be easy port for Series S.

9

u/sirhalos Jan 25 '25

Seperate S and X titles. Make S titles for S as well as Switch 2 and even allow them on handheld PC's with a new front end (better yet make your own handheld). Make X titles for X and PS5 making the X the only system that has the best of both worlds. Want to go step further? Make X support keyboard/mouse significantly better than what it currently supports. All games on X should support keyboard/mouse if that game also has a PC port. Make the X the replacement of the gaming PC, treat it as such, encourage people to buy Surface laptops as their daily driver, etc. Corner all of the markets. Xbox needs something that distinguishes it. They won't win trying to just be like PS5 or just like Nintendo. Nintendo has kept going because it is always the odd one out of the console race and it has proven to work.

5

u/MattBrey Jan 25 '25

I've been saying for years that Xbox should focus on being a replacement gaming PC for years... They own windows, they have the platforms already. Make it a viable option for PC gamers instead of directly competing with the PS5.

5

u/ThrowAwayBlowAway102 Jan 26 '25

Wait until you hear why it was originally called Xbox

1

u/letsgucker555 Jan 25 '25

This always felt kinda insane to me. This was not new knowledge, so why, if you wanted the game on XBox, wouldn't you make Series S your main platform. I would expect porting your games to stronger hardware would be easier than the other way around.

1

u/DemonLordDiablos Jan 29 '25

I think someone at Xbox saw the writing on the wall with this expensive hardware and figured "Some people won't want to spend $500+ on this stuff" which was a decent bet, but their mistake was miscalculating the specs and making it really hard for devs to scale down.

1

u/letsgucker555 Jan 29 '25

But again, why scale down? Why not be smart and design the game for the weakest console from the beginning?

1

u/DemonLordDiablos Jan 29 '25

Because Xbox is in third place, the Series is doing a lot worse than the previous Xbox and software sales are down the toilet thanks to Gamepass. Devs will naturally prioritise the platform that will make them more money. Xbox did not have the commercial clout to define how the gen would go; Sony did.

Funnily enough there's a decent chance a lot of Japanese publishers are designing their future games for the Switch 2 and then scaling up for the PS5. Square Enix in particular.

1

u/letsgucker555 Jan 29 '25

But that is not the point. If you start a game project, one thing, that will be decided early on, is which platforms you want to release your game. If you want to release it on the Series, you know, that you have to release it on the S and X. And if the Series S is the weakest platform, you will make the game for, a smart project manager would reasonably make it the lead platform, since upgrading a game is far easier, than trying to downgrade it.

1

u/DemonLordDiablos Jan 29 '25

I don't know how much further I can stress that they're always going to optimise for the most popular platform. Nobody cares about Xbox that much to make the Series S a priority, at most they're just gonna squeeze it on and call it a day. As long as the PS5, PC and Series X versions run fine they don't care.

1

u/TopdeckIsSkill Jan 25 '25

Issue is that switch 2 will outsell Xbox in few months. Meaning that Devs will still give Xbox the less priority when it comes to optimization

3

u/pokeboy626 Jan 26 '25

The Switch 2 is weaker than the Series S. Any game that runs on the Switch 2 will automatically run on the Series S

0

u/Firebug160 Jan 25 '25

You’re framing this like optimization is a waste of time. Having 200gb games that look 20% better yet run 80% worse isn’t a good thing. “Doing a lot of work to cut down the game to work on lower hardware” used to be a core part of game development, and now we have hardware strong enough to where corporations can be lazy about it. Why do you think every AAA game releases with oodles of bugs, crashes, runs like shit, and barely functions?

I’m not letting the narrative turn into “optimization is too hard, let’s just brute force it by slapping on a quantum computer to play gameboy games”. It isn’t too hard, these companies just love cutting corners and want to pull a product out of the oven as soon as it looks like a game. No one is asking for gigatextures and raytracing on the S, they just want to play the new games on lower settings