Gaming

Though Microsoft’s parity requirements have been in place since the Xbox Series consoles came to market in November 2020, Baldur’s Gate III is the ecosystem’s highest-profile loss directly attributable to these restrictions.

There weren’t a ton of concrete examples to prove this theory, and the Digital Foundry team argued against the idea, citing the existing variance in the PC market and saying that lower targets could actually help games run even better on higher-powered consoles.

“MANY developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped,” Bossa Studios VFX artist Ian Maclure tweeted at the time.

Rocksteady senior character technical artist Lee Devonald similarly tweeted about his experience building Gotham Knights — a game that shipped on consoles with a framerate locked at 30 fps and no performance mode.

Regardless of whether the Series S is restraining the entire video game industry, Xbox parity requirements are literally holding back Baldur’s Gate III, and this system has accidentally created another console exclusive for the PS5, for now.