Baldur’s Gate 3 just made the future of Xbox Series S a bit more uncertain

polygon.com:

This week, the two biggest role-playing games of the year are released in a head-to-head on rival console platforms. But only one of them is a console exclusive. Starfield was acquired by Microsoft along with its developer and publisher, Bethesda, in 2021, and will be released on Xbox and PC only. Baldur’s Gate 3 — which has already become an overnight sensation on PC, if you can say that about a game that spent three years in early access — is out now on PlayStation 5, but an Xbox version is still weeks or months away. And it could have been much longer.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s developer, Larian Studios, has no timed exclusive arrangement in place with Sony or anyone else. Initially, it would not commit to releasing the game on Xbox before 2024, if at all, because it could not get the split-screen co-op mode working on Xbox Series S — the lower-cost, lower-power Xbox console. As Larian explained, Microsoft requires gameplay feature parity between Series X and Series S versions of games. It also strongly prefers feature parity with the PlayStation versions of multiplatform releases, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has split-screen co-op on PS5. If Larian could not get co-op working on Series S, it wouldn’t be able to release the game on Xbox consoles at all.

This put Microsoft in a difficult spot. Baldur’s Gate 3 was wowing critics, making huge waves on Steam, and quickly establishing itself as one of the biggest and best games of the year. To miss out on it because of a policy own-goal would be embarrassing, not to mention frustrating for Series X owners. But the company had good reasons for sticking to that policy — perhaps even high-minded ones about keeping gaming affordable.

As IGN reported, Microsoft even drafted some of its own