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I guess that’s debatable, depends on how you define what “it runs” means. PC gamers with dated hardware may be fine with playing on 1080p, while on the Xbox Microsoft might veto if it doesn’t run on 1440p and 30fps. Of course weaker hardware won’t run everything faster hardware can, you can’t just sprinkle infinite magic optimization dust on a game, there are simply limits what’s possible with weaker hardware, and once you’ve reached them you can’t just shout “enhance” like in CSI Miami.
The article doesn’t explicitly state it but heavily implies “the Xbox series S is too weak for modern titles”. The optimization is necessary because it’s weak as fuck. It’s very much the same as optimizing for a PC, with the additional constraint that they need to artificially dial down the experience on other consoles, too, due to contract stipulations that prevents them from “giving an edge” to a competing product. The problem is not that it’s different from optimizing for PC, the problem is that it’s “optimizing for a PC that is in principle too weak to handle the load”.
Ok eli5 how that’s not the same. If you had said “the Series Shit™ is weak sauce” I would have understood. But if that’s not the case, what stops the devs from turning the graphics dial all the way down to “washed out pixel mess” to accommodate the very much PC-like hardware. For which you don’t have to worry about players messing with the config because you simply don’t let them.
Not in my opinion: if you read the article, it clearly says that Microsoft enforcing a level of quality for dated hardware leads to devs abolishing features that the hardware series S hardware won’t be able to support. They also can’t decide to not support the S unless they abandon the Xbox series X as well. It leads to lower quality games for everyone, not just series S owners.