Katsuhiro Harada does not like the Xbox Series S

Katsuhiro Harada, Bandai Namco’s former General Manager and creator of the Tekken series, has a bone to pick with the Xbox Series S, Xbox’s entry-level and lower-spec console. At a panel discussionreported on and translated by Inven Global, Harada brought up his frustrations with developing games for the weaker Xbox console, how it differs from making a game for Nintendo’s handhelds, and how he wishes it had simply never been made.

The panel, which was moderated by former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida, also featured DongKi Lee from ShitftUp, Kazutaka Kodaka of Too Kyo Games, Pawel Sasko of CD Projekt Red, and Tynan Sylvester of Ludeon Studios. Yoshida led a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of developing for consoles over PC, which Harada used as an opportunity to talk about esports tournaments and his experience with the Tekken series—at least, initially. He then launched into some frustrations he had been holding in about the Xbox Series S.

“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,” Harada said with a laugh. “I want to ask Director Paweł personally—honestly, weren’t you upset inside because of Series S?”

Pawel Sasko, who worked on Cyberpunk 2077 as an associate game director, was a lot more buttoned up in his response, saying that the Xbox Series S forces developers to meet the challenges of a lower spec and optimize their code more cleanly. For many people, that may have been a sign that the discussion needed to move on, but Harada continued on from there.

“You just used a very polite and elegant way to say ‘Xbox Series S sucks,’ right?” Harada asks to laughs. “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.”

“Furthermore, in markets like the U.S., there are more Series S users than Series X users, so we can’t just cut corners. Yet after launch, Series S users direct their complaints at us developers rather than Microsoft, asking ‘why is texture resolution lower only on Series S?'”

Harada’s gripe here is, essentially, the major selling point of the Xbox Series S. When the consoles launched in 2020, Microsoft packaged the Series S asthe cheaper option that could play all the games the Xbox Series X would—and was, in fact, required by platform policy to do so—at a lower resolution. But those technical specs, alongside the required policy that it match the Xbox Series X version, have proved to be frustrating for developers like Harada. Games likeBaldur’s Gate 3andNo Rest for the Wicked’sdelayed Xbox versions were blamed on the Series S not being up to snuff.

That could be an easily permissible problem if not, as Sasko points out, the fact that Xbox Series S seems to sell better or equally as well as the Series X, meaning that cutting it out would mean cutting the Xbox audience in half. Pawel also notes that it’s better overall to have the Series S, as it ensures the game runs better on consoles with a higher tech ceiling, and it gets more people invested into gaming at a lower price.

Harada worries aloud that Pawel’s praise of the Series S will convince the Xbox people in attendance that they should implement a similar dynamic withthe upcoming Xbox codenamed Project Helix. DongKi Lee of Shift Up used this as an opportunity to ask Xbox for a Helix devkit, mentioning that they would be the first studio in Korea to receive one.

Harada recently left his position at Bandai Namco at the end of 2025 tolead a new subsidiary under former rival SNKcalled VS Studio.