I think the issue was precisely that. They didn’t plan for the surge of users coming in on day one and whatever cloud hybrid system they have for this game got overwhelmed. We’ll get to know about the game’s actual quality a week from now I guess.

MSFT potentially planning to bring these back?

It seems buying ABK made MSFT give up on exclusivity entirely

It shows how devs often look at better hardware and prioritise heavier features over image quality and performance. Current gen of games could easily do 4k60 (most last gen games run like that) if they didn’t try to get RT into the mix, but devs don’t like that as RT gives them more time and resources that originally would’ve been spent on placing lights or baking scenes.

While I say that, consolidation by a large company like Sony, MSFT, etc may not be bad for this reason, it can be bad for other reasons like how Activision treats its IPs after CoD. But then studios that have anything left but their IP may eventually be bought up, making consolidation an eventuality unless they themselves become big enough. Okay now my brain hurts.

Exhibit A why consolidation is bad.