Xbox One X price is not unreasonable, says ARK: Survival Evolved developer

The Microsoft E3 2017 presentation brought a number of game announcements, as well as some details on what we previously knew as Project Scorpio and now know as Xbox One X. The beefed up Xbox One is bringing a ton of liquid cooled power to gamers in the guise of a smaller console with a $499 price tag.

Xbox One X will be available for pre-order later this year, but the price is a bit of a sore spot for some gamers. While some are lamenting over the price, others aren't. Studio Wildcard, the developer behind ARK: Survival Evolved, doesn't mind it.  Co-Founder and Co-Creative Director Jesse Rapczak, sat with Geoff Keighley during the YouTube E3 2017 Live Show (via WCCF) to discuss the upcoming addition to the Xbox One series.

During his talk, Rapczak revealed ARK would be aiming for 60FPS on the Xbox One X, something he claims is "not possible" for the game on PS4 Pro. On top of that, Rapczak calls the price for Xbox One X reasonable.

"It’s amazing. It’s basically like Epic settings on PC, we’re targeting 60FPS. We recently introduced variable frame rate, but on Xbox One X with the extra horsepower, you’ll notice less variation in your frame rate even in busy situations.

"The PS4 Pro also has improved frame rate when compared to PS4. Before the XB1X, it was the best console version of ARK, but it’s hard to argue with that 6 teraflops [laughs]. Having the same frame rate in our game isn’t really possible, there are a couple reasons for that: the XB1X not only has a faster CPU than PS4 Pro, it also has a lot more RAM. I’d say there’s a 50% performance difference.

"The Xbox One X is great. Everything from the devkits is so much easier to develop for. It’s faster in all sorts of ways, especially for us developers it’s easier to iterate. In terms of horsepower, it’s just phenomenal, it is expensive but when you think about the price for a similarly specced PC, it doesn’t unreasonable at all to me.

"Overall, the quality is going up a lot. It would have been easy to say, hey, let’s just take the Xbox One version and crank up the resolution, but actually, we’ve brought over some enhanced effects from PC. We’ve actually got volumetric lighting and clouds on Xbox One X, higher draw distance that is equal to PC’s Epic settings, higher resolution textures…"

Do you think that the price is reasonable?