Atlus and SEGA are clearly in bed with Xbox for the upcoming Persona ports — and we’ve known that for a while. Not only are the new versions of Persona 5 Royal, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 3 Portable coming to Game Pass — while PlayStation users have to pay with no upgrade path — Microsoft even managed to place embargoes on key announcement details. Indeed, when the ports were first revealed, nothing was allowed to be said about their release on non-Xbox or PC platforms — namely PS5, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.
I wouldn’t put much thought into this. The Xbox ecosystem is much different than Sony’s.
A “Native” X|S sometimes can still be an X1/X1X version of the game running with enhancements due to be Gen9 Aware rather than a true, built from the ground up for Series X|S, “Native” app.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the same way. It got a Gen9 Aware enhancement and later got a X|S moniker with zero changes to any capabilities over what was already there when a Gen9 Aware patch was released. In fact, I think if you look at File Info it still states that it’s a “Gen9 Aware” game AND can still run off the external HDD. Halo MCC is also similar in this sense.
Plus, Xbox doesn’t change clock speeds to match the previous hardware like PS5 does. So even X1 games get significant loading boosts on Series X|S. PS5 gets some boost to loading, but not nearly as much on the Series X|S side where it’s darn-near transformative.
It’s possible that Sony will also get some enhancements for running on PS5 but it’s still the PS4 version. However, because of the way Sony handles cross-gen, Atlus would literally have to create a whole new build of the game for PS5 – something not entirely necessary on the Xbox side of things.
Bottom line: I think it’s more of a branding thing on Xbox: developer adds some enhancements for Series X|S while still using the X1/X1X code and it’s considered “Native” to differentiate from a game getting an FPS Boost which is handled by Microsoft at the DirectX level.
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