At a roundtable during the Console Game Developers Conference in Korea, Tekken developer Katsuhiro Harada said he wished Microsoft had never released the Xbox Series S, arguing that its limited performance and memory make it difficult to develop for.

The Series S resembles the more powerful Xbox Series X, Harada said, but requires extra optimization while developers still have to maintain major feature parity between the two consoles.

Even so, developers cannot ignore the Series S because it has a large user base, including in the United States; players may blame studios when its version has lower-resolution textures.

Harada did not identify the projects behind his criticism, which sits at the center of a broader question: whether an affordable console’s expanded audience justifies the added development burden.

Microsoft launched the digital-only Series S in 2020 as a lower-priced alternative designed to run the same games as Series X at lower resolutions, and generally requires Series X releases to work on both systems.

Supporting materially different hardware can add performance tuning, quality-assurance work and certification risks, while constraining memory budgets, asset detail, streaming and feature scope across a game’s platforms.

Baldur’s Gate 3 illustrates the trade-offs: Larian delayed its Xbox port while working to preserve split-screen play on Series S under Microsoft’s feature-parity requirement.

That work also had a broader payoff, as memory optimizations made for split-screen on Series S improved RAM and VRAM use in the PS5 and PC versions.

CD Projekt Red associate game director Paweł Sasko agreed that Series S optimization is challenging, but said lower-powered hardware can encourage improvements elsewhere; he pointed to work on Cyberpunk 2077 for Nintendo Switch 2 that was later applied on other platforms.

Sasko also argued that the Series S’s lower price makes gaming accessible to more people and can expand a game’s potential audience.

Microsoft and AMD have rolled out FSR 4.1 to Xbox Series X|S developers, with AI upscaling intended to improve image quality and performance without more powerful hardware, potentially extending the Series S’s useful life.

The 512GB Series S now costs $499, up from its $299 launch price, but the article says it remains the cheapest way to play Grand Theft Auto 6 at launch.