Former Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada has criticized the Xbox Series S. According to Inven Global, Harada was talking during a panel at the Console Game Developers Conference 2026 in South Korea alongside a number of other industry professionals, including former Sony president Shuhei Yoshida as the moderator, and 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 as fellow panelists.
Discussing the subject of developing games for consoles, Harada said that he wished that “hardware like Xbox Series S wouldn’t be released.” Noting that a senior Xbox official was also in attendance, Harada then asked Sasko whether he was “upset inside” due to the weaker console. After a laugh, Sasko responded by saying, “It constantly throws challenges at us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly.”
Harada went on to criticize the console, asking Sasko if he “just used a very polite and elegant way to say ‘Xbox Series S sucks,’ right?” Among his biggest complaints about the console is the fact that it is similar to the Xbox Series X,
