Larian is having trouble fitting Baldur’s Gate III on the Xbox Series S, the lower-priced and lower-powered console in Microsoft’s ninth-generation lineup.
I was looking up more information on why there’s such an issue getting BG3 on Xbox, and found this article with a lot more detail on the topic.
EDIT: The issue isn’t graphics or frame rate; it’s memory. The article goes into detail.
The article says they’re not allowed, legally, to do that, and the ball is on Microsoft’s yard.
they are not allowed to have one good version and a crippled version. they absolutely are legally allowed to just cripple both. “but the ps5 will have split screen!” well then, sucks to be you if you bought an xbox. think microsoft for that, sony consoles have nothing to do with it. or microsoft could just admit to themselves that expecting a next-gen game to run equally well on literally-worse-than-last-gen hardware is just a pipe dream.
As far as I can tell the article only talks about a feature parity requirement between the Xbox Series S and Series X versions. And that could be met by just dropping the feature from both versions.
They may or may not have the requirement anymore, but they definitely used to have this parity clause as well. Then if it came to other platforms first and Xbox later, the Xbox version had to have bonus content beyond the original release.
I also thought they might have such a requirement but I was unable to find a source that confirms (or even mentions) it. Definitely still possible though.
I remember it coming up on podcasts back during the 360 era, so that was long enough ago that things may have changed.