Katsuhiro Harada, the former director of the Tekken series, has said he wishes Microsoft had never released the Xbox Series S. He said he hoped hardware like it “wouldn’t be released” again. Harada made the comments on a developer panel at the 2026 Console Game Developers Conference in Seoul on 9 November. He said a senior Xbox official was in the audience at the time.
Harada said the Series S is a device “so similar” to the Xbox Series X but with “awkwardly lower performance”. He said developers must do extra work for it after finishing their main version. He compared the task to extra work for “a slightly weaker child”. He also said Series S players ask developers why texture quality is lower only on their console.
Who Is Katsuhiro Harada?
Harada led the Tekken fighting game series at Bandai Namco for more than two decades. He left the company at the end of 2025. He now heads VS Studio, a new studio under SNK, a long-time rival of Bandai Namco in fighting games. His comments carry weight because Tekken 8 was released on the Xbox Series X and Series S in 2024.
The panel was moderated by Shuhei Yoshida, a former PlayStation executive. Other speakers included Paweł Sasko, associate game director at CD Projekt Red, and DongKi Lee of Shift Up. Sasko disagreed with Harada. He said the Series S pushes developers to write cleaner code and brings players into gaming at a lower price. Harada said that was a polite way of saying the console was not good enough.
Harada contrasted the Series S with the Nintendo Switch 2. He said porting to the Switch 2 is different because it is its own device, rather than a weaker version of another console. The conference was organised by the Korea Creative Content Agency. The Xbox official Harada referred to has not been identified.
How Harada’s Criticism Affects the Xbox Series S
Microsoft launched the Xbox Series S on 10 November 2020 as a cheaper, digital-only option alongside the Series X. It was designed to run the same games as the Series X at lower resolutions. Microsoft generally requires games released on Series X to also run on Series S. Developers have raised the lower memory of the Series S as a challenge since its launch.
The Series S is still part of Microsoft’s plans for major releases. GTA 6, for example, uses Xbox Series S settings when streamed through the cloud, as we covered in our report on GTA 6 coming to Xbox One through the cloud. Microsoft raised the price of its Xbox consoles worldwide from 1 August 2026.
Microsoft has not responded publicly to Harada’s comments. It has not said whether a successor to the Series S is planned, or whether its next consoles will include a lower-priced model. Microsoft has not announced a date for its next Xbox hardware.
