Xbox Series S parity clause primes first-party games for Xbox handheld, Switch 2

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While gamers (and sometimes developers) lament the Xbox Series S parity clause, Microsoft sees it as a major advantage in its fight for future competition in the games industry.

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The Xbox Series S is substantially weaker than the Series X, but it's also $200 cheaper. The Series S was meant to grow the Xbox userbase with a lower-cost option that's locked to the digital ecosystem, furthering Microsoft's high-value target goals. This power difference has caused headaches for some developers who are bound by a strict parity clause (all Gen 9 Xbox games have to run on both Series S and Series X in order to get released) that forces them to scale down their games to run on the much-weaker Series S.

Overall, though, this is a good move. At least that's what Microsoft thinks. The rationale is that developers could use the Series S spec profile of their games onto other lower-power devices. This is especially true with first-party games like Minecraft, which has been carefully scaled to run on both consoles and on the Nintendo Switch handheld (Minecraft is wildly popular on the Switch and makes far more money on Switch than it does on Xbox).

In a recent interview with Destin Legarie, Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer discussed in length how the Series S parity clause has turned out to be a boon for the company:

"I think about it in almost exactly the opposite way. Right now, with the rise of handheld PCs, and even the you know the introduction so far of the Switch 2.

"As developers, we're building on more device specs from lower-powered...because they're battery powered devices all the way through things that plug into the wall.

"I actually think we have a real advantage because we've been targeting us for quite a while, that our games have been built and they're portable across many different specs.

"So when we look at something like a Steam Deck or a ROG Ally or something, we've got this S version of the games that's more tailored to the device specs of a lot of devices that frankly are getting introduced right now, and I think that's a really good thing that helps us.

"Frankly, the scalability of engines today allows them to scale from, you know ray trace enabled gaming on a multi-thousand dollar graphics card on my on desktop PC, all the way through a handheld battery-powered device.

"So for me, S has been helpful in our portfolio and I'm like, I'm playing Indiana Jones on S and it looks great. It's definitely capable of playing current generation games in a great way, but most of your games that are going to be out there are going to be supporting these different devices.

"The S spec actually maps pretty well to the devices that we're seeing introduced right now, so I think it actually is an important design point for our teams going forward, that kind of power performance mix that you see in the Series S."

In other news, Phil Spencer has also confirmed that Xbox hardware is a critical part of the business and Xbox consoles aren't going anywhere.

This is the third time that we've had Microsoft executives comment on Xbox hardware, the first two with Sarah Bond in early 2024 and CEO Satya Nadella in the holiday Q&A investors call.

An officially-branded Xbox handheld is believed to be in development, and Microsoft is currently experimenting with handheld technology.