TEKKEN Creator Katsuhiro Harada Says He Wishes Xbox Series S Did Not Exist

Katsuhiro Harada has said he wishes the Xbox Series S had never been released. Video Games Chronicle reported his remarks, which came during a panel at the Console Game Developers Conference in Seoul.

Harada is known as the creator of the TEKKEN fighting game series. His X profile describes him as the former creator and director of TEKKEN and Soul Calibur, and Video Games Chronicle says he now heads VS Studio, a new developer owned by SNK. He spoke at the closing session alongside Shuhei Yoshida, Paweł Sasko and Shift Up chief technology officer DongKi Lee.

Harada said he wanted to speak plainly while he had the floor. A senior Xbox official was in the room, he said, so he wanted that official to hear it directly.

His complaint is about the extra effort involved. After a team has delivered its best work for Xbox, he said, adjusting a game for the Series S feels like "doing extra work for a slightly weaker child." The smaller console has limited memory, which he called a problem. The harder part, in his view, is that the Series S performs like the larger Xbox Series X in many ways but falls short on performance.

Harada also pointed to the number of players. In markets such as the United States, he said, more people use a Series S than a Series X, so developers cannot cut corners for it. He added that after a game launches, Series S players tend to complain to developers, not Microsoft, when textures look lower in resolution on that console alone.

Sasko offered a different angle on the same hardware. He said the Series S keeps throwing challenges at developers, and that those challenges push them to write very clean code.

Harada's comments are his own views, and the panel did not settle how developers should balance the two Xbox models.