Redout developer 34BigThings has threatened legal action against Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, after the site published a video erroneously claiming that the Xbox One X version of the game renders at 1080p.
Digital Foundry published a video and article over the weekend comparing the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions of the game, in which the publication wrote: “Not every release for Xbox One X can be a winner, but we genuinely expected more from Redout: Lightspeed Edition.” The report continued to note that “all of our pixel counts resolve 1080p resolution only on both X and Pro consoles,” though a subsequent video from VGTech confirmed that digital resolution scaling was being utilized by 34BigThings.
Needless to say, this negative press saw 34BigThings being widely criticized by Xbox One X owners, with Digital Foundry’s claims of Redout‘s 1080p resolution and unstable frame rate causing a major headache for the developer.
“Nicest part of a cloudy saturday morning? Waking up to a shitstorm raging upon you, based on what we can call incompetent technical analysis at best, fake news at worst,” 34BigThings’ founder Valerio Di Donato wrote in an official statement.
“Digital Foundry might have been a competent source of technical information in the past, but it might be currently going down to the click-baiting path,” Di Donato wrote. “They just published an opinionated video on our game, Redout, in which they talk about Xbox One X performances, framerate and resolution, mentioning over and over that Redout shows a 1080p rendering for the Xbox One X version.”
“This is a pure, straight lie. The Xbox One X got an enhancement update a couple of weeks ago which brings 4k rendering with dynamic resolution scaling to everyone (owners or not of 4k TV),” he continued. “More specifically, we managed to scale the resolution between 90% and 50% of native 4k, which means the resolution goes from the upper limit of 3456×1944 to the lower one of 1920×1080 [confirmed also by VG Tech]. More technical details on this will follow in the next days, when everybody will be back from holiday vacations but meanwhile let us spell it out: it’s not 1080p.”
Di Donato then went on to discuss how 34BigThings is looking into pursuing legal action against Eurogamer. “We are currently looking into various ways to defend our public image,” he concluded. “Not only because we dislike being called lazy or incompetent gratuitously, but also to send a message to the players and the industry. Gamedevs (indies especially) are amongst the most hard working people, to the point that burnout and crunch culture in game development are widespread. Really, just stop calling them lazy to the first hiccup. And don’t fabricate excuses for calling them lazy. Ok? Thank you.”
Digital Foundry took down the Redout video and published an update to their original post outlining their mistakes. VGTech’s comparison between the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions of the game can be viewed below:
