While Sony has been quite vocal with its plans to end the production of PlayStation discs in 2028, and in the process, entirely killing off the concept of physical game releases for its console, Microsoft has been quiet about the subject. In a new interview with the BBC, however, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has opened up about the future of gaming hardware at the company, and even acknowledged that “players love physical media”.
“I know players love physical media, and I know there’s a lot of benefits in digital media, and I want to make sure people have a choice.”
She also brought up the fact that Xbox recently announced its new initiative that would give players with physical copies of Xbox One and Series X games digital licenses for those titles that can be added to their library. “There are stacks of games on everybody’s shelves. We’re announcing the ability for players for 1,000 titles with physical discs to be able to have a digital entitlement.”
“We’ve long pioneered backwards compatibility, and so you’ll continue to see that as we go forward in the generations.”
When it comes to Project Helix, however, Sharma didn’t confirm one way or another whether the company would continue to support physical media. Rather, her main subject of discussion was how Xbox could deal with the ever-increasing component costs in the current market and balance raw hardware performance and keeping prices down.
“This next generation, we have to be thinking about efficiency and affordability alongside performance. As an industry, we’re in the middle of ‘Rampocalypse’. All of the industry needs to start to innovate on affordability and efficiency. That is something that we have not had to do [previously].
“But with the crisis that’s currently happening in hardware and components, it is absolutely something all of us need to be thinking about and innovating on and giving people more choice in terms of how they play their console and how they purchase their console.”
Xbox announced its disc-to-digital initiative earlier this month, and the feature is slated to be available for testing to Xbox Insiders from August 31st onwards. Thousands of Xbox One and Xbox Series X games will be supported. To get digital entitlement for their physical games, players have to pop the disc into their console to see the option. Making the switch also brings in benefits like cloud gaming and Xbox Play Anywhere. Along with this, the physical copy of the game will still be usable on its own.
While a noteworthy feature on its own, it also provides hints about Microsoft’s plans regarding backwards compatibility on future consoles. The fact that Xbox and Xbox 360 discs aren’t currently supported is also interesting, and the company is likely still working on a way for players with decades-old game libraries to bring them forward to modern hardware. Xbox players also have to keep in mind that not every game across Xbox One and Xbox Series X is currently supported. However, as we saw with the company’s backwards compatibility efforts, the number of supported games will likely go up over time.
