I think the most successful Xbox game last gen was Forza Horizon 4
I mentioned Playground too 
So does it mean that the Xbox Series devkit only became available in June for developers? That doesnt seem like much time to port a game to the Console, does it? 
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Internal teams and big third parties probably had for a bit longer with older versions but yeah.
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I think you are underestimating the power of Halo right now. The launch of The Master Chief Collection on Steam was massive. I’d love to hear numbers from MS about it.
Meanwhile, Mojang is obv. the biggest moneymaker. 
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Sea of Thieves had a massive steam launch too and also some mtx. I genurally believe sot is more popular.
No. June is when the first version of the GDK was released whereby a developer could develop commercial games for all Xbox consoles, streaming and PC according to the memo.
Do we know the reason why it came so late?
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Oh, not saying the Sea of Thieves launch on Steam wasn’t huge. It was. And it still shows up in the top 10 most sold now and then. It’s very impressive.
Just, looking at the SteamDB statistics (not entirely accurate regarding sales)
Sea of Thieves:
Master Chief Collection:
huh that steamdb data is very interesting, especially on the median playtime for sea of thieves, the median play time in the last two weeks is twice as much as halo MCC, and the median total playtime is roughy 60% higher too.
It seems like the sea of thieves fan base is more dedicated than the Halo one! even though the halo fan base is larger.
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yeah but sea of thieves was already strong on xbox and win 10. Steam came at such a late point, while the mcc launched with steam day one. All my pc friends are on the win 10 version.
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Fair enough. That could indeed be the case, that the Sea of Thieves userbase skews more Game Pass/Windows 10 than Steam.
falco mentioned that in his newest video
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They decided to wait for the full gpu RDNA 2 from AMD
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Just watched it. Thanks for linking this.
The game doing twice the numbers compared to last year and most people playing on Xbox/Windows 10 is interesting indeed. (And big things seem to be coming to the game in 2021)
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There are various levels of devkits, each one with slight hardware adjustments. There were hardware revisions made available after June 2020 that had revision with respect to Hardware Decompression; earlier hardware devkits did not have full-speed decompression. Historically console developers have started early game development using PC hardware with targeted performance of what retail hardware will be close to.
The June 2020 GDK is the earliest software development environment that can be used to certify a game for launch. If you read through the release notes, there are multiple known issues listed that could have non-trivial impacts on performance. There’s multiple statements of “Performance for ____ in the June 2020 release isn’t indicative of the final expected performance and will be improved in future releases.” or “We’re planning to move to ____ in a future release of the GDK.”
It’s also the first GDK revision that made VRS (Variable Rate Shading) available to be used.
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That’s what I had thought, and even mentioned earlier in this thread which another member questioned which made me doubt myself. Nice to get some clarification though. 
Just wanted to add that before actual dev kits go out Microsoft would provide a computer spec that is roughly equivalent to the consoles, so that devs have an idea of where to aim for. This equivalent spec would have gone out to devs years ago probably. In fact in an interview that Todd Howard did with noclip about fallout 76, he was already implying that he was happy with what the next gen consoles were doing, and that was in 2018! so devs have had a general idea for a while. So for the series X for example they might have said its equivelant to a r7 3700 clocked at 3.6 GHz and a 2070 with an ssd.
Sounds like just a matter of time then.
I saw that DF has their Dirt 5 video now. I didn’t watch it, I can guess the outcome. I’m a bit over it too. Just gonna wait and see and in the meantime enjoy the hell out of the system.
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I’m sure devs who already had projects in the pipe with release dates close to launch had under development versions and early release versions of the kits. MS was likely soliciting feedback as well. Then with the June release those partners would switch to the new kits and be able to begin certifying games.
One thing it does tell me is that any insider who was making big claims about performance months or years ago is probably suspect if “developers say” featured prominently in their discussion. We know the kits weren’t widely distributed, haven’t been available for making release games for more then a few months and that they were very hard to come by.
A lot of people were saying Andrew Reiner was vindicated for his comments last year. I think it’s the opposite. I doubt any devs at E3 in 2019 had access to both the XSX and PS5 dev kits in any reasonably comparable to release form and very few likely had anything at all.