At a developer panel in Seoul, Katsuhiro Harada called Series S development "extra work for a slightly weaker child" with a senior Xbox official in the room, and joked he's scared Microsoft will make a "Helix S." Cyberpunk 2077's Paweł Sasko pushed back, and the Stellar Blade studio's CTO asked for early Helix dev kits.
Katsuhiro Harada picked the perfect room to say the quiet part out loud. Speaking at the Console Game Developers Conference 2026 in Seoul on Monday, the longtime Tekken boss looked out at the audience, noticed a senior Xbox official sitting there, and went for it.
“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, according to Inven Global’s full transcript of the panel.
He didn’t stop at the joke. Harada, who now runs VS Studio after his Tekken years, explained that memory is part of the problem, but the bigger headache is how close the Series S is to the Series X without matching it. “When porting to Switch 2, developers can shift their mindset to ‘Switch 2 is a distinct device for Nintendo fans!'” he said. “But with Xbox, after delivering your absolute best output, it feels like having to do extra work for a slightly weaker child.”
He also admitted the part Xbox fans should actually hear. “In markets like the US, there are more Series S users than Series X users, so we can’t just cut corners,” Harada said. And when a Series S version looks softer, he said players blame the developers, not Microsoft, asking “Why is texture resolution lower only on Series S?”
The counterpunch came from the same stage
The best answer to Harada came from right next to him. Harada had tried to drag CD Projekt Red’s Paweł Sasko into it, asking if the Cyberpunk 2077 associate game director was secretly upset about Series S. Sasko laughed and said it “constantly throws challenges at us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly.”
Then he made the real case. Sasko said squeezing a game onto lower spec hardware makes it run better everywhere, including high-end PCs and handhelds like Steam Deck and ROG Ally, and pointed to Cyberpunk 2077 Version 2.5 carrying optimization work across platforms. “And the biggest advantage of Series S is that its affordable price makes it accessible,” he said. “Not every gamer can buy expensive high-end hardware.”
That’s the argument we’d make too. The Series S is the reason millions of players got into this generation at all, and Harada himself just confirmed it’s the box a huge chunk of the US is playing on. Developers having to do more work is real. But “more people can afford to play your game” is not the problem it’s being made out to be, and the optimization lesson Sasko described pays off for PC players as well.
Helix is the real story
Harada closed with a jab at what comes next. Sasko “packaged Series S so gracefully that the Microsoft representative in the audience keeps nodding along,” he said. “I’m worried they’ll feel reassured and release a successor like ‘Helix S’ for the next-gen Xbox as well.”
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Xbox hasn’t said anything about a lower-tier Helix, so that’s Harada worrying out loud, not a leak. What did go under the radar is the other answer on that panel. Shift Up CTO DongKi Lee, whose studio made Stellar Blade, said: “Personally, I am looking forward to the next-gen Xbox ‘Helix’. From an engineer’s standpoint, if you provide us with a dev kit first in Korea as early as possible, we will put in our best efforts to develop for it.”
So the same panel that roasted Series S had a major Korean studio publicly asking Xbox for Helix dev kits. That’s the headline nobody’s running.
The Series S debate isn’t new. Baldur’s Gate 3 famously needed Microsoft’s flexibility on split-screen to ship on Xbox, and creators like Del have argued for a while that Series S held the generation back, a point he made again today.
But Harada just handed Xbox a useful roadmap for Helix: if Microsoft wants an affordable way in next gen, make it feel like its own device instead of a weaker twin, and get dev kits to studios early. Do that, and the “weaker child” problem goes away.
Image: ©INVEN
Sources
- Inven Global: 6 Developers Behind Global Hits Share Console Game Development Insights
- VGC: Katsuhiro Harada says he wishes Xbox Series S didn’t exist
- Kotaku: Tekken Boss Katsuhiro Harada Says Developing For Xbox Series S ‘Feels Like Having To Do Extra Work For A Slightly Weaker Child’
- GamesRadar+: In front of Xbox staff, ex-Tekken boss says developing for Xbox Series S “feels like having to do extra work for a slightly weaker child”
- X: Kotaku on Harada’s comments
- X: Del on Harada and Series S
