Quantum Error “Pretty Much Done,” Xbox Series X Version Held Up by Slower SSD Say Devs

Quantum Error made a name for itself as one of the very first major indies announced for the PS5 back in the day, and the game would make further headlines by jumping to Unreal Engine 5 and eventually announcing an Xbox Series X/S version. Well, it seems TeamKill Media may be regretting the latter move.

A fan on Twitter recently asked for an update on Quantum Error, and the game’s official account responded by saying the game is “pretty much done” and “a hair away from going gold.” This prompted another question about the XSX version, as we haven’t really seen it in action beyond a brief teaser. TeamKill gave a surprising answer to this, saying optimization will take a “bit of time” as the game has been designed around the PS5’s solid-state drive and the Xbox Series SSD is “quite a bit slower.”

“We will have a couple gameplay videos lined up to show off as soon as we can announce everything. We have started looking into optimizing the game for Xbox, but it is definitely going to take a bit of time unfortunately; QE has been made to be played with the PS5’s extremely fast SSD, the Xbox SSD is quite a bit slower and so we are going to have to change things quite a bit to make up for that difference in speed.”

The TeamKill guys aren’t lying – the PS5’s SSD offers raw read speeds of 5.5 GB/s, while the Xbox Series X/S is only 2.4 GB/s. There haven’t been a lot of games that really put the PS5’s speedier SSD to full use, but if Quantum Error is indeed built around it, porting to Xbox could conceivably be a challenge. Another fan asked whether TeamKill will use Microsoft’s DirectStorage tech to streamline loading, and they responded that they’re “going to try everything we can.”

Could TeamKill be playing some partisan games with these statements? Possibly. Again, Quantum Error was initially announced as a PlayStation exclusive. They also seemed to respond positively to a Twitter suggestion they should become a PlayStation first-party recently. Nevertheless, the difference in SSD speed between the PS5 and XSX is something that’s been identified as a potential multiplatform development bottleneck by others in the past, so it’s interesting to see it brought up.

Quantum Error is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. A release date has yet to be announced, but the devs have hinted the game (at least PS5 version) will arrive this year.