Former Tekken boss asks Xbox not to repeat the Series S, calling it 'extra work' for developers
Speaking at a developer conference in Seoul, former Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada asked Microsoft not to release another console like the Xbox Series S, noting that a senior Xbox official was in the audience. He said it with a laugh, but the complaint behind the joke was serious: the cheaper console forces studios to do their work twice.
Harada, who left Bandai Namco after more than three decades and now runs VS Studio SNK, a Tokyo studio that SNK brought into its group as a subsidiary in May, was speaking on the closing panel of the Console Game Developers Conference 2026. The event took place on November 9 at the SKY31 Convention in Seoul's Lotte World Tower as part of Game Days 2026, according to Inven Global. Former Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida moderated, and Harada shared the stage with Shift Up CTO DongKi Lee, Too Kyo Games CEO Kazutaka Kodaka, CD Projekt Red associate game director Paweł Sasko, and Ludeon Studios CEO Tynan Sylvester.
"A senior Xbox official is actually in attendance"
Asked about the advantages and practical challenges of consoles compared with PC, Harada first made the case for consoles in esports, where standardized hardware makes tournaments cheaper and more reliable to run than rooms full of identical PCs. Then he changed the subject:
"That said, there's something I really want to say while I have the floor. Since a senior Xbox official is actually in attendance here today, I wish hardware like the 'Xbox Series S' wouldn't be released."
He then turned to Sasko and asked whether he had been "upset inside because of Series S." Sasko burst out laughing before answering: "It constantly throws challenges at us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly."
Harada wasn't letting him off that easily, however:
"You just used a very polite and elegant way to say 'Xbox Series S sucks,' right? Low memory is an issue, but the hardest part is that it's a device so similar to Series X while having awkwardly lower performance. When porting to Switch 2, developers can shift their mindset to 'Switch 2 is a distinct device for Nintendo fans!' But with Xbox, after delivering your absolute best output, it feels like having to do extra work for a slightly weaker child."
Why developers can't cut corners on Series S
Harada added that in markets such as the US there are more Series S owners than Series X owners, so studios cannot treat the cheaper console as an afterthought. Yet when textures look worse on the Series S after launch, he said, players complain to the developers rather than to Microsoft. He did not cite a source for the split between the two models.
The hardware gap explains the frustration. The Xbox Series S has 10GB of GDDR6 memory, split into 8GB at 224 GB/s and 2GB at 56 GB/s, and a 4-teraflop RDNA 2 GPU with 20 compute units. The Xbox Series X has 16GB of GDDR6, with 10GB at 560GB/s and 6GB at 336GB/s, and a 12-teraflop GPU with 52 compute units. Developers have raised similar concerns about the Series S's memory since its 2020 launch, and some have had to engineer around it. The Coalition, for example, worked with Xbox's platform team to build a system for Gears of War: E-Day that uses the console's NVMe SSD as an extension of its RAM.
Making the case for the Series S
Sasko did not entirely disagree, conceding that "Harada speaks a lot of truth," but argued that optimizing hard for low-spec hardware pays off across all platforms. CD Projekt Red applied the optimization work from its Switch 2 version of Cyberpunk 2077 to all other platforms in update 2.5, he said. He also called the Series S's low price its biggest advantage, since not every player can afford high-end hardware and the console puts games in front of more people.
Harada had the last word here: Sasko had defended the Series S so gracefully, he said, that the Microsoft representative in the audience kept nodding along, and he now worried Microsoft would feel reassured enough to release a "Helix S" alongside its next-generation Xbox.
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