Rockstar has long been able to pull off some incredible feats when it comes to bringing massive, technically demanding games to lower-powered consoles like Xbox Series S and Nintendo Switch, and while it's more fun to chalk it up to witchcraft, a lot of it likely has to do with the unparalleled resources available to a company funded by some of the most profitable intellectual properties of all time. Most people wouldn't take issue with that, but if you're the founder of a much smaller studio facing performance demands from people using games like GTA 6 for comparison, I could see that becoming tiresome.
That's exactly the predicament Thomas Mahler, founder of Ori and No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios, is lamenting in a sharply worded tweet sent out today. In it, Mahler says he's sick of people who don't know an Xbox from an ex-box (a thing which was formerly a box) demanding 60 FPS on Xbox Series S just because the console will be able to run GTA 6.
"I just love comments like: 'How dare your game isn't running at 60fps on Xbox Series S yet when GTA VI will run on it?!?!'" says Mahler.
"1) We don't know yet how well that thing will run.
2) Well, gee, I don't know, MAYBE it's because Rockstar literally just spent over a billion dollars and had THOUSANDS of people working on it for over a decade now?"
As Rockstar's next game has yet to come out, there's no telling how it'll run on Xbox Series S, but again, there's little reason to doubt the studio's capabilities with regards to performance. Red Dead Redemption runs mostly great on the OG Switch and Red Dead Redemption 2 manages a rock-solid 30 FPS running at native 4K on the last-gen Xbox One X.
I just love comments like:"How dare your game isn't running at 60fps on Xbox Series S yet when GTA VI will run on it?!?!"1) We don't know yet how well that thing will run.2) Well, gee, I don't know, MAYBE it's because Rockstar literally just spent over a billion dollars and…August 17, 2026
Continuing his rant about lofty performance expectations, Mahler says "it's always the people that have absolutely no technical understanding that are always the loudest," and that their hysterics amount to "pure fanboyism.
"But sure, the 6 year old machine that cost $299 at launch and literally has half the RAM that even a Steam Deck has ought to run all the newest games at perfect performance, makes sense. It's not like other devs haven't been struggling with this thing for a long time now."
It's true that the Xbox Series S has been a thorn in the side of developers trying to achieve performance parity across consoles for years. Although Mahler isn't the only prominent developer who's spoken publicly about the issue, he's probably the most outspoken about it, having previously compared the Series S's specs to those of mobile hardware.
"It's incredibly difficult to support these potato machines and none of your fanboyism will make that statement any less true," says Mahler.
The Series S seemed like a great, consumer-friendly entry point to the current generation of consoles in theory, but it's clearly a pain point for a lot of developers who want to release their games on Xbox without performance compromises. That's a real shame, because in a world where $1,000 games consoles are becoming more and more accepted, a cheaper alternative has never made more sense from a player's point of view.
