A hypothetical situation: I’m looking for, say, a MAN scenery, but the only current one is nearly three years old and perhaps looking a bit dated. I’m just about to buy when a dev announces a superb rendition of MAN for PC and Xbox. It looks fantastic and this particular dev has an excellent reputation, so I abandon my purchase and, five weeks later, buy and download the best MAN scenery ever. Now, had that developer not announced that Xbox release, I may have bought the older version — which in turn would have made me loath to shell out again despite the obvious improvement. See where I’m coming from?
I think Speedbrake22 makes a pretty point, in that us Xbox owners need to perceive confidence from devs in order to instil confidence in ourselves and the FS console experience. The Xbox is now a fully-fledged MSFS market and, thankfully, most devs seem to have realised that. The advent of WASM apparently makes it far easier to port sceneries across, meaning that devs have relatively little to do, save for a bit of optimisation (it of course being easier to remove content than to add) and subsequent testing. That isn’t to say all devs are interested in releasing for Xbox — after all, it is an extra workload, regardless of how easy it might be — but at least the reasons not to develop console versions are becoming fewer and fewer.
Also, several developers have effectively demonstrated that extremely complex and detailed sceneries, unchanged from their PC originals, can run superbly on Xbox.
The Xbox will never support MSFS quite like a PC. But with the full backing of developers, I’m sure it will prove a lucrative sideline as the console market continues to grow. That they managed to get the base sim so close to the very best PC performance is truly astonishing in my opinion — there’s little doubt that the Xbox version offers more bang for your buck — along with a more user-friendly experience for those who just want to plug and play without having to spend time tinkering.