Katsuhiro Harada Xbox Series S developer criticism, Digi Mart USA News: Former Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada asked Microsoft not to release another console like the Xbox Series S while speaking on the closing panel of the Console Game Developers Conference 2026 in Seoul. According to Inven Global, the event took place on November 9 at the SKY31 Convention in Seoul’s Lotte World Tower as part of Game Days 2026.
Harada, who now runs VS Studio SNK, a Tokyo studio brought into SNK’s group as a subsidiary in May, made the remark after discussing the advantages of consoles in esports. He said he wished hardware like the Xbox Series S would not be released, noting that a senior Xbox official was in attendance.
He said it with a laugh, but the complaint behind it was serious: the cheaper console forces studios to do their work twice.
Harada pressed CD Projekt Red associate game director Paweł Sasko on whether the Series S had frustrated him. Sasko said the console constantly challenges developers to optimize their code cleanly.
Harada argued that the Series S has low memory and performance that is awkwardly lower than the Series X, so developers must deliver their best output and then do extra work for a weaker version.
The hardware gap explains the frustration. According to the figures cited in the report, the Xbox Series S has 10GB of GDDR6 memory and a 4-teraflop GPU, while the Xbox Series X has 16GB of GDDR6 and a 12-teraflop GPU.
Developers have raised similar memory concerns since the Series S launched in 2020, and The Coalition reportedly built a system for Gears of War: E-Day that uses the console’s NVMe SSD as an extension of RAM.
Sasko agreed that Harada speaks a lot of truth but said optimizing hard for low-spec hardware benefits all platforms. He said CD Projekt Red applied optimization work from its Switch 2 version of Cyberpunk 2077 to other platforms in update 2.5, and called the Series S’s low price its biggest advantage.
Harada also said that in markets such as the US there are more Series S owners than Series X owners, although he did not cite a source for that split.
