I can see what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft was going for with the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series S. With ambitions to make video games more accessible for all regardless of platform, putting out a digital-only console at a lower price point with more conservaꦓtive specs mad൩e a lot of sense.

In practice, however, it struggled to gain a foothold. While cheaper, its existence as a weaker piece of hardware has become a frequent point of frustration for developers, while 500GB of storage is only enough for a small handful of triple-A titles before you need to start wiping the console to make room for more things. Xbox Series S is i🅘ntended for a casual audience with its cheaper price point and digital-only approach, more a competitor to the Nintendo Switch than the PS5, but at every turn it seems so intent on pu๊shing those people away.

Xbox Series S Doesn’t Have A Place In The Modern Market

. This is only a hundred dollars and change removed from the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series X, a better console with a disc drive, more 𝄹powerful specs, and a machine that developers have already shown much more affinity for in recent years.

It has more longevity, and even casual consumers would be better placed picking one of these up than resorting to the Series S. You can’t exactly yeet it in your backpack like the smaller console and play it at a fr𒁏iend’s house, but when there are so many better options for this kind of experience already, it feels moot. So where exactly will the console go from here, and does it have a future alongside its older sibling?

You can also pick up a digital-only Xbox Series X these days too, which means there’s even less need for a cheaper and smaller 🐻console like the Series S.

Microsoft dug its own grave with the Xbox Series S by making cross-platform parity between its two consoles a requirement, meaning that a lot of developers are forced to struggle to create their games for two platforms with drastically different technical capabilities. When the audience is considerably smaller than that found on PS5, for many it is a Herc🌜ulean effort that doesn’t offer worthwhile returns.

We saw this back in 2023 with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3 when . Without needing to buy up any rights, Sony found itself with an exclusive hit for months whi꧒le Microsoft had little choice but to miss out.

It took Phil Spencer to meet with Larian and make an exception for Baldur’s Gate 3 to be released on the console without this X/S parity, removing a defining part of the Xbox console ethos in the process. If you can make an exception for one game, why not others? It puts the🍰 Series S in the high-profile position of holding back the Xbox platform because of its weaknesses.

So Does The Smaller Xbox Console Have A Future?

More recently, GameScience bemoaned the lack of an Xbox version of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Black Myth: Wukong that 🍒fans have been asking about for months now. Speaking on , co-founder and CEO Feng Ji explained, after praising the PS5 and PꦬC versions of the game, that “the only thing missing is the Xbox, which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work.”

It seems the studio has tried to make Black Myth: Wukong work on Xbox Series X and Series S, but with each version having to be feature complete and matching aside from visuals and performance, it has proven too difficult to make work. This must be frustrating for Microsoft too, because now it’s missing out on another massive hit because its console strategy has blown up in its face. You can’t even stream Wukong on Xbox because it isn’t availaꦦble, and right now it is unclear if it ever will be. A console that claims to be appealing to a mainstream audience is failing to deliver some of the most mainstream games in recent memory.

Funnily enough, the Series S would work wonderfully as a handheld, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:and if rumours ring true,♉ Microsoft could be working on something justಞ like it.

As games grow more demanding in technical requirements, the Series S is bound to be left behind - especially in a world where ꧒Game Pass hasn’t become the dominating force it once promised to be and Microsoft’s approach to exclusive development fails to bear fruit. There is an alternate reality where the Series S took over the lives of gamers everywhere, but right now there remains a desire for powerful consoles and physical media, so much so, that there doesn’t appear to be a future for this little black and white box.