Speaking at a developers conference in Seoul, former Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada called on Microsoft not to release another console like the Xbox Series S, noting that a senior Xbox official was in the audience. He said it laughing, but the complaint behind the joke was serious: the cheaper console forces studios to do their job 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 fold as a subsidiary in May, spoke at 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 present”
When asked about the advantages and practical challenges of consoles over PCs, 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 here today, I wish hardware like ‘Xbox Series S’ wouldn’t be released.”
He then turned to Sasko and asked him if he had been “upset inside because of Serie S”. Sasko laughed before replying: “He constantly challenges us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly.”
Harada, however, did not let him go so easily:
“You just used a very polite and elegant way of saying ‘Xbox Series S sucks,’ right? Low memory is a problem, but the hardest part is that it’s such a similar device to Series
Why developers can’t save on the Series S
Harada added that in markets like the US there are more Series S owners than Series X, so studios can’t treat the cheaper console as an afterthought. However, when textures look worse on the Series S after launch, he said, players complain to developers rather than Microsoft. It did not cite a source for the split between the two models.
The hardware gap explains the frustration. The Xbox Series S has 10 GB of GDDR6 memory, split into 8 GB at 224 GB/s and 2 GB at 56 GB/s, and a 4 teraflop RDNA 2 GPU with 20 compute units. The Xbox Series Developers have raised similar concerns about the Series S’s memory since its launch in 2020, and some have had to work on it. The Coalition, for example, worked with the Xbox platform team to create 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 S Series
Sasko doesn’t entirely disagree, admitting that “Harada speaks a lot of truth,” but argues that strong optimization for low-spec hardware pays off across all platforms. CD Projekt Red has applied optimization work from the Switch 2 version of Cyberpunk 2077 to all other platforms in update 2.5, it said. He also called the Series S’s low price its biggest advantage, since not all gamers can afford high-end hardware and the console puts gaming in front of more people.
Harada had the final say here: Sasko had defended the Series S so gracefully, he said, that the Microsoft representative in the audience kept nodding, and now he feared Microsoft would feel reassured enough to release a “Helix S” alongside its next-generation Xbox.
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