IGN: Is the Xbox Series S a net positive, in the eyes of a top-tier developer like Remedy?
Thomas Puha (Remedy): Choosing my words carefully here - we like Xbox, we like Sony. On Series S, the CPU is pretty much the same as on Series X. There's not a massive difference, but the GPU is an issue, it really is. Then, having less memory is a pretty big problem. We often get comments like, 'Hey, you make PC games, surely you know how to scale.' Well, memory is not a problem on PC. It really isn't, and that's one of the struggles when you talk about resolution and frame-rate.
It's not enough to just drop the resolution heavily (that's what we're doing on the Series S) and really, really working hard to make sure that the visual quality still holds up. It's strange that people can't accept that on a weaker PC, you're just going to have less. The visuals are not going to be as good, and your frame rate is not going to be as high as expected.
There's a massive difference between Series S and Series X GPUs. Sure, people can mention that this game did this so well and all that, but every game is different, and every developer is different. You can't have the best of both worlds, and you have to choose where you're going to focus.
I think the Series S is priced at $250 or whatnot, while the Series X and PS5 are $500. Obviously, there's a massive difference in the power you're getting, right? It's a lot easier to scale on the PC because of memory. It's not like there's one super PC and one weaker PC. There are 300+ PC configurations in between, and trust me, that's a massive struggle. But we've shipped a lot of games on PC, so we're a bit better about that. We really worked hard on getting the Series S to run at a solid 30 FPS and trying to maintain good visual quality. But if you want to see the game (e.g. AW2) at its best, in full next-gen glory, then it's going to be on the machines that have the hardware grunt to enable that.