Thomas Mahler, founder of Moon Studios (developer of Ori and No Rest for the Wicked), recently took to social media to express his strong dissatisfaction with players demanding that Xbox Series S versions of games run at 60fps by citing GTA 6 as an example.
In his tweet, Mahler wrote that he is fed up with people who "don't even understand what Xbox is" clamoring for XSS versions of games to run at 60fps, simply arguing, "If XSS can run GTA 6, why can't your game?"
He rebutted point by point: "First, we don't even know how well GTA 6 will actually run on XSS. Second, perhaps it's because Rockstar just spent over a billion dollars, mobilized thousands of people, and developed it for more than ten years?"
Mahler continued his rant, stating that players making unrealistic performance demands often have "no technical knowledge," and their behavior is purely driven by "fanboy tribalism." He pointed out that the XSS is a console released six years ago with an initial price of only $299, and its memory is even half that of the Steam Deck. "Is it reasonable to expect this machine to perfectly run all the latest games? We're not the only developers struggling with this hardware."
In fact, the performance issues of the Xbox Series S have long been a common pain point for developers. Due to the significant performance gap between the XSS and the Xbox Series X, developers face numerous optimization challenges in achieving a consistent experience across both platforms. Mahler had previously compared the XSS specifications to mobile hardware, stating that "supporting these 'potato PCs' is extremely difficult."