The Xbox Series S has found itself in the crosshairs once again this week after former Tekken director told a panel at the Console Game Developers Conference in South Korea, that he wished hardware like the Series S had never been released. Going as far as to call it "extra work for a slightly weaker child."

Reported and translated by Inven Global, apparently Katsuhiro Harada complained about the console's lower memory, and joked that he hoped Microsoft isn't planning a "Helix S" for next gen. The comments have now fired up the Xbox Series S's most passionate detractors, who are using these quotes as definitive proof that the Series S is holding the entire industry back and, frankly, I'm tired, boss.

The argument is inherently anti-consumer, elitist and completely ignores the benefits of game optimization for everyone and every console, not just Xbox Series S. More importantly, it ignores the current state of the market and what consumers can actually afford right now and for the foreseeable future.

On the same panel, CD Projekt Red associate game director Paweł Sasko had a counterpoint to Harada's comments. Laughing them off and said that the Series S is valuable precisely because developing within its constraints makes studios optimise their code more cleanly, work that ends up making the game significantly better on all platforms. It's not the first time we've heard this sentiment. Of course, Larian wrestled with the Xbox Series S over Baldur's Gate 3 so much it ultimately delayed the launch of the game on the Xbox ecosystem, but the memory optimizations they engineered to make split-screen work on the S directly resulted in massive RAM and VRAM improvements across the PS5 and PC versions of the game.

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