Ori dev says stop demanding 60fps on Series S just because GTA 6 runs on it

Caught a GamesRadar piece where Thomas Mahler from Moon Studios is basically telling people to chill on the Series S performance expectations. His argument is that Rockstar has a budget smaller teams can't even dream of, so using GTA 6 as the benchmark for what the Series S should handle is unfair to everyone else.

I get where he's coming from. Rockstar can throw hundreds of people and years at optimizing for one console profile. Ori and similar games are made by way smaller crews. If every game had to hit 60fps on Series S because GTA 6 does, a lot of indie and mid-size studios would be screwed.

But at the same time, the Series S was marketed as a 1440p/120fps machine back in the day. Microsoft set those expectations themselves. Now we're seeing games struggle to hold 30. GTA 6 is probably going to be 30fps on both Series X and PS5 anyway, so the Series S conversation feels a bit moot for this specific game.

What do you all think? Is it fair to compare every game's performance to GTA 6 on the same hardware, or should we cut smaller studios some slack?

Source: GamesRadar+ · Curated content.

Comparing every studio to Rockstar's budget is like expecting your MC business to pull Cayo Perico numbers. Rockstar just spent over a billion. Most indie teams are working with maybe $2-5 million. Completely different profit-per-hour.

Series S was a $299 box marketed as budget-friendly. You don't buy the cheapest warehouse and complain it can't hold as much product. If GTA 6 is 30fps on Series X and PS5 anyway, the whole Series S debate is pretty much dead.

Smaller devs need to hit break-even. Burning six months to squeeze 60fps out of a $299 console that eats their margins? You're bleeding maybe $50k a month in labor for zero extra sales. Bad math.

Burning six months to squeeze 60fps

That part rings true, but I wonder if we're overthinking the budget angle. A smaller game with tighter scope might actually hit 60fps easier than a massive open world, provided they plan for the Series S memory bottleneck from day one. Rockstar's money buys artists and tools, sure. It doesn't magically bypass the same bandwidth limits every dev faces on that machine.

What bugs me is how the Series S split pool seems like a physics problem more than a funding problem. Could a mid-size studio get there if they treated the S as the lead platform instead of a down-res target? I'm not sure. The marketing was definitely fuzzy though.

Rockstar's billion-dollar optimization budget is an outlier. Most studios can't afford six months of labor just to squeeze out extra frames.

this. back in '04 we didn't check fps counters, we just hoped the disc didn't scratch.