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The story
Katsuhiro Harada, known for the Tekken series, became a hot topic on 5ch after voicing complaints about the development burden of the Xbox Series S in an interview with Korean outlet Inven. Despite sharing a similar design with the Series X, the Series S has awkwardly limited performance, and Harada said working on it feels like having to redo a game that was already polished for high-end hardware — joking that he wishes hardware like this simply didn’t exist. In the thread, some mocked the console’s weak specs, while others pushed back, citing GTA6 and Street Fighter 6 running smoothly as proof it really comes down to developer skill. The discussion also spread into comparing prices across the Series S and various PS5 models.
What people said
Katsuhiro Harada, known for the Tekken series, has criticized the development burden of the Xbox Series S. According to Korean outlet Inven, he joked, "I wish hardware like this didn't exist."
What Harada said was especially troublesome is the limited memory, combined with the fact that despite being very similar hardware to the Series X, its performance is awkwardly low. With the Nintendo Switch 2 you can just treat it as a completely separate piece of hardware, but with the Series S, even after achieving the best possible result for high-end hardware, it feels like you have to redo the work all over again just for the weaker model.
It's because they don't get that this IS the answer that prices keep crossing stupid lines like 120,000 yen lmaooooo
Even though he wasn't working directly as a director, before leaving the company Harada was in a position overseeing Namco-affiliated IPs and had a say in deciding which hardware titles shipped on. This is a valuable interview precisely because it's testimony from someone at that level expressing frustration about having to accommodate the Series S — and by extension, low-performance hardware in general.
They don't build games to the PS5 Pro standard though
Don't worry — with FSR 4.12 support, the Series S actually stands to benefit the most.
It's a well-known Microsoft corporate drone, so you can only guess based on who benefits from what.
There was a place that said something similar recently and then disappeared… makes you wonder if there's some kind of contract or arrangement behind it.
That's exactly why, even if you go and buy a Pro, you end up with nothing but games that look no different from the base model.
The point is that if you build around the PS5 and Series X as the baseline, the Series S's weak performance makes things a struggle, right?
Won't it end up selling under 3 million units worldwide, final tally?
Looks like it might even top the Dreamcast (as a flop).
The fate of people who couldn't update their thinking even as the times changed.
If garbage like the Series S costs 100,000 yen, then Helix will probably run 500,000.
Now that prices have shot up this much, the Series S has become a real threat, so they want to run it down to kill it off.
Don't you know what the Series S costs right now?
Even so, it's still cheaper than the PS5, right? At least overseas.
According to NPD it's dead last by a wide margin — posted its worst sales yet in September too.
No difference.
Series S: $499.99
PS5 Digital Edition (refurbished): $499.99
PS5 Digital Edition: $599.99
Xbox Series S 512GB $499.99
Xbox Series S 1TB $599.99
Xbox Series X Digital Edition 1TB $749.99
Xbox Series X 1TB (with disc drive) $799.99
Xbox Series X 25th Anniversary Edition $899.99
PlayStation 5
Model North American Price
PS5 Digital Edition 825GB $599.99
PS5 1TB (with disc drive) $649.99
PS5 Pro 2TB $899.99
Can't believe they'd slap this price on a PS5 that's basically just a PS4 with an SSD bolted on. The biggest console ever made, buggy as hell, crashes nonstop, has killed off countless live events — a real streamer-killer of a trash station.
Re: #19
That's rough. Do they just not care at all about making their own product better?
It's many times more powerful than the PS4, lol
Re: #67
That's pricey. Guess those old-school discount sales just aren't an option anymore?
The one that's basically a PS4 inside is the Series S, come on.
If hardware adopting Canis actually gets made and support is forced on everyone, I think third parties will be furious. You might ask "well what about the Vita, then?" — but the performance-first developers currently snubbing the Switch 2 weren't putting much effort into the Vita either, while the studios that were actively supporting the Vita have now normally shifted to leading with Switch/Switch 2. So it's not really a double standard.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The Xbox Series S is a budget model released in 2020 that shares the same CPU and architecture as the Series X while significantly cutting back on GPU power and memory. Third parties have to take titles built around the Series X version and separately rework them for the Series S, and Harada’s comment was pointing at exactly this burden of having to “redo the work.” The “parity” mentioned in the thread refers to an industry practice of requiring features and visual quality to be matched between a flagship console and its lower-tier counterpart — a debate that has come up in the past not just around Xbox, but also around PlayStation’s support for older hardware generations. Within the thread, opinion was split between those who saw drops in resolution and image quality as an inherent limit of the hardware itself, and those who saw them as a lack of effort or optimization on the developers’ part. Both sides point to specific examples (ports said to have been a struggle, versus others that reportedly ran smoothly) to back up their case, so it’s worth keeping in mind that the reality likely varies from title to title.
*This article is composed of excerpts and a summary from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “[Sad News] Harada: “The Xbox Series S has low performance, and because of that low resolution, users complain anyway”.”
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