CD Projekt Red associate game director Paweł Sasko defended the Xbox Series S onstage in Seoul this week, right after former Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada told a panel audience, with a senior Xbox official in the room, that he wished the console had never been released.
Harada, who now leads SNK VS Studio, opened the exchange bluntly. “Since a senior Xbox official is actually in attendance here today, I wish hardware like the ‘Xbox Series S’ wouldn’t be released (laughs),” he said, before turning to Sasko and asking him directly whether the Series S had upset him internally. His remarks, relayed by Inven Global from the Console Game Developers Conference panel, quickly spread across outlets. No primary recording of the session has surfaced, so every quote from the panel is second-hand.
Sasko’s case for the cheaper console
Sasko, whose studio shipped Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.5 this year, did not deny the friction. “It constantly throws challenges at us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly,” he said of the lower-spec machine. He argued that the discipline required by Series S pays off everywhere, making games run significantly better on PS5, high-end PCs and handhelds like Steam Deck and ROG Ally, and he called the console’s affordable price its biggest advantage. Harada was not persuaded, replying that Sasko had found “a very polite and elegant way to say ‘Xbox Series S sucks,’ right?”
Why the argument matters to players
Microsoft requires feature parity between Series S and Series X for games releasing on Xbox, which makes Harada’s complaint a studio-side cost, not a consumer problem on its face. But he argued it lands on developers twice: the Series S, he said, has more users than the Series X in the US market, and its owners direct post-launch complaints about lower texture resolution at developers rather than Microsoft. He contrasted that with porting to Switch 2, where a team can treat the hardware as its own distinct device, and said Series S work feels like doing extra work for a slightly weaker child.
Harada closed with a joke, saying the Microsoft representative in the audience kept nodding along, and that he worried the company might feel reassured enough to ship a next-gen successor like “Helix S” (laughs). Microsoft has not commented on the exchange.
