‘Thousands’ of Xbox One and Series X titles will support the new feature.
The future of physical video games has been a hot topic in the last few months, largely fuelled by Sony’s highly controversial and out-of-the-blue announcement that it will no longer make disc-based PS5 games after January 2028. We don’t yet know what Xbox’s future plans are in that department, but Microsoft has at least now officially unveiled a new digitization feature that effectively allows players to create digital copies of their physical games.
Details of this were first revealed in a report from The Verge earlier in the summer, and it will enter its testing phase on August 31 for Xbox Insiders. Microsoft didn’t share too much detail about how this will all work, but it said that “thousands of titles” would be supported at launch, including “most” disc-based Xbox One and Series X games.
“Players can claim a digital entitlement by inserting a supported disc into an Xbox One or Xbox Series X console and launching the game,” Microsoft wrote on Xbox Wire. “Once the entitlement is claimed, you can experience the benefits of digital, including Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming where supported, while your physical disc continues to work exactly as it always has.”
As outlined in the Verge report in July, it sounds like Xbox 360 and original Xbox games won’t be part of this program, at least at launch. That report also said that you won’t need to keep the disc in your console once you’ve established your digital copy, but that the disc is bonded to that digital license, so if someone with a different Xbox account puts it into their console, the license will still transfer to that account.
This ensures that people can’t install the digital version of the game to their console and then pass the disc onto a friend without them needing to purchase their own copy. It also means you can still trade in your physical games and lend them to friends when you’re finished with them.
It seems unlikely that the next Xbox (codenamed Project Helix) is going to come with a disc drive, so this would give current Xbox owners plenty of time to digitize their physical libraries so they can follow them to that console if they decide to upgrade. It’s not clear if Sony will come up with something similar.
