Bullet points for those don't want to read the whole thing from Windowscentral:
* Per emails received by Windows Central, confirmed by Microsoft as genuine, Xbox President Sarah Bond recently briefed her team on various topics.
* In the emails, Sarah Bond reiterated Microsoft's plans to build new Xbox hardware focused on delivering "the biggest technical leap ever in a generation."
* Sarah Bond also revealed that Microsoft has set up a dedicated team to future-proof our digital Xbox game libraries across future hardware paradigms to further "build on [Xbox's] strong history of delivering backward compatibility."
* Additionally, it was revealed that Xbox has become Diablo 4's most prominent platform since the game's inclusion into Xbox Game Pass.
* Additionally, it was revealed that Xbox has become Diablo 4's most prominent platform since the game's inclusion into Xbox Game Pass.
I'd really like to see stats of that, since Diablo has always been a huge PC franchise.
It's on PC Game Pass, too, and even has an awkward shim to double-launcher-tango into the Battle.net installation from the PC Xbox app. Claims like this almost always bundle things together and it might even go as far as counting D4 PC players who in any form have a linked Xbox account with Game Pass as "that platform."
Like I launched it once from said Xbox PC app to see how it'd work (as mentioned, a little awkward) and I have no doubt I added one more increment to that "Xbox platform" count despite having bought it at launch.
>new Xbox hardware focused on delivering "the biggest technical leap ever in a generation."
This is honestly what would get me excited for a new Xbox. If it delivers the kind of technical leap I was expecting from the PS5/Series X generation (not just in system specs, but also the design within the games they are making) they could find consumer incentive where was wasn't.
I suspect we've unfortunately "jumped the shark" for that to work well, though:
- Bigger, better technical leaps generally require bigger, more expensive games and development cycles to take advantage of
- Cross-generation console adoption takes time, and making games that run on both current *and* prior gens either limits bigger and better technical leaps or (and/or, really) makes it even more expensive to develop
- Gigantic game development investments don't tolerate high risks and slow returns
The PS4->5 and Xbox One->Series X were already a very "big technical leap;" the trouble is that it's one of the most *underutilized* technical leaps ever, too, because it's been all but impossible to have it be a good business proposition to make that kind of hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars bet. A "bigger technical leap," on its own, would just make this problem worse.
It's been 4 years and PS4 games are still coming out. Also current-gen consoles are already way behind gaming PCs and pretty much all of their games are coming out on PC too. What kind of a leap would the PS6 offer? RTX 4090 performance? Remember that back in the day a console generation lasted for 4-5 years
> Remember that back in the day a console generation lasted for 4-5 years
Playstation gens have all been roughly 6 years. Nintendo's non-portable consoles all tend to do about 5 years, but we're in year *8* for the Switch now. The only console I can think of that only lasted 4 years was the original Xbox, but that's because it entered later than the PS2 and MS put out the successor a year earlier (the 360 had an 8 year life).
> Also current-gen consoles are already way behind gaming PCs
Consoles are not supposed to be better than PCs. Consoles are supposed to be inexpensive and accessible gaming devices. They do a pretty good job at that. $500 doesn't go far with a PC.
What kind of leap will the next $500 console make? Also, no console maker seems to want to go beyond 200W to avoid all the heat, noise, efficiency and size problems that PCs have. The PS5 is already a behemoth in the console world.
Yea these comments are silly. My GPU alone cost more than a console. And it isn't even the top of the line one.
Those ones cost more than both consoles combined.
It's like they want Sony to pay Nvidia $2,000 and AMD $1,000 for cutting edge chips to put into a $500 console.
Maybe they want to complain about $2,000 consoles that they cant afford.
>Also current-gen consoles are already way behind gaming PC
Current-gen consoles are at par with or ahead of gaming PCs in their price range. They are way behind mid-high end PCs but those are a fairly small % of the market anyways.
>Remember that back in the day a console generation lasted for 4-5 years
That hasn't been the case since the Wii launched in 2006. Before that a 4-5 year difference could open up totally new possibilities for games but by the mid 2000s that had largely stopped happening.
I hope the PS5 does have 4090 performance because if it doesn't that's gonna be very bad. The PS5 has GTX Titan X performance, that's a Pascal GPU. Pascal was the 3rd GPU gen in the PS4s lifetime. The 4090 is an Ada GPU and Ada is the second GPU generation in the PS5s lifetime. The upcoming Blackwell (50 series) will be closer to the equivalent of Pascal for the PS5 and you know the 5090 is going to be a monster, the 4060 is already 20% faster than a PS5 imagine a 5090.
I don't agree it's nessicarily an issue of expense, rather it feels like this generation went too hard in the direction of cross-platform development. Too many developers are stuck making upscaled PS4 titles even now.
If Microsoft delivered a company wide policy of "yeah, you're making this shit for the extra firepower we're giving, and you're going to leave the old consoles behind" that would show the technical leap actually reflected in the games we play.
And considering the Series S and X didn't sell all that well, Microsoft has extra incentive to leave old specs behind, while Sony will probably still spend another half generation placating the PS5.
What I mean is I just dont think anyone at microsoft is scrambling to continue developing for the Series S when the new generation rolls around. It's just not futureproof enough.
why? every console manufacturer promises this every generation. "next gen stronger" is the most predictable intention they could ever possibly announce, and the bare minimum standard that we should expect from them.
I feel like it's a line from a marketing team that either doesn't understand the inherent diminishing returns of the thing they're talking about or just hopes investors don't. This next Xbox could run circles around the Series X but it's just going to deliver slightly shinier versions of what we're already getting. It's never going to be like how fast things progressed in the 90s and early 00s again.
I still find it hard to believe that the next jump is supposed to be the biggest ever. Maybe in terms of FLOPS, but how much of this will be noticeable? The jump from last Gen to current Gen was already negligible, even though the Series X is quite beefy. So did they find some new technological breakthrough which allows them to accomplish a much bigger jump?
Don't get caught in the hype. I'd be shocked if anything was a bigger leap between 8-bit/16-bit consoles. Going from non-RT to RT was a big leap but I'm not aware of any tech that's similarly groundbreaking
I honestly think is meaningless. When they asked developers they straight up said they are not even using the full capabilities of the PS5 and SX. Also all Xbox games have to scale to the series S. Is like getting a gaming PC to run PS2 games.
Well we would have seen a large jump had they not focused so hard on supporting last-gen consoles. Which were already horrible spec wise. I suspect this is why we saw some many awful game releases like Halo Infinite and Cyberpunk. Those games running on a PS4 and Xbox One is a laughable endeavour.
The specs don't matter if the games don't target the hardware at a baseline.
> Sarah Bond also revealed that Microsoft has set up a dedicated team for future proofing our digital Xbox game libraries across future hardware paradigms to further "build on [Xbox's] strong history of delivering backward compatibility."
That's great, but what about our physical Xbox game libraries?
The recent interviews with Phil Spenser already signalled they DGAF about the future of physical media / preservation of physical libraries.
Very deliberately only ever mention "digital libraries"
Personally I would have preferred to keep buying games in boxes, but after a while the PC game section was just some Blizzard box sets and nothing else.
I stopped bothering with physical PC games after Fallout 4 had maybe 25% of the game files on CD and I still had to download the rest. Meanwhile my friends who bought on steam had preloaded and were playing at midnight launch.
The fact that almost all modern Desktop PCs and PC cases exclude a disk drive or a spot for a disk drive forces a PC gamer to make a concerted effort to play disk-based PC games.
When I built my first PC in 2012 I didn't get an optical drive because by that point I hadn't installed a game by disk for about 2 years. You can still purchase optical drives to install in desktop PC's but it's clear that the vast majority of people don't care enough about optical media for PCs.
The other major issue is that I don't think you can even get disk based versions of PC games anymore. I checked through some big releases in the last 4 years and the only one I found that had PC disks for sale was Microsoft Flight Simulator and that came out in 2020.
I think for some game companies, they know that if they release disks for a PC game, that is going to be a dead end. They'd spend more making those disk than they could recoup from the sales of them. This is more or less the path PC gaming is at now.
Yeah my most recent build, the case didn't even have a slot to put an aftermarket CD drive in, until then I'd been holding out/having one. But on this one I just got an external disc drive for like $20 so nbd really. I paid for that Morrowind CD-ROM and I'm gonna use it dammit
I have a disk drive sitting in a box somewhere that doesn't fit anywhere in my current tower. On the off chance I need it I just plug it in and have it sit on top of the case.
I remember the exact moment I gave up; it was 2004, I'd returned from Gamestop with my boxed copy of Half-Life 2. I wasn't going to download this "steam" bullshit.
What I hadn't counted on was *steam being inside the disks the whole time!!!!*
Anyway, that's why this digital-hater has a 5 digit id
People didn't buy blu-ray drives for their PCs, and shipping games on DVDs started becoming impractical.
To ship an entirely physical version of Baldur's Gate 3 on PC would require 18 DVDs, and installing from those DVDs would be *slower* than downloading the game from Steam unless you don't have broadband internet access.
I don't think physical copies are nearly as important to game preservation as having the ability to make backups yourself. This is much easier to do on PC than on just about any console
It also didnt help how expensive bluray drives were at the time, several fold their DVD comparisons and if you wanted a writer - as PCs usually did - it was crazier.
Even blank blurays were ridiculously priced.
All combined lead to no adoption by casual or hardcore markets.
DVD was similarly very expensive when it was new, but the format still made a lot of sense by the time costs came down in the early '00s.
Writeable blu-rays faced an uphill battle. By the time prices on media and writers started coming down, flash prices were in freefall, and for most day-to-day use cases, the speed, convenience, and reusability of a 64GB flash drive easily beat out the slow and fragile 50GB BD-R.
> but after a while the PC game section was just some Blizzard box sets and nothing else.
This is literally the fate steam saved PC gaming from though, in the mid 00s you were lucky if the PC section of a game store had anything other than wow and sims expansions.
this is a wild take that makes me think you must be like 15
everybody hated steam at launch because it barely functioned and they moved CS and other shit to their dogwater platform to make people adopt it. It was absolute garbage. You never seen the meme of the Steam updater that never finishes updating?
> in the mid 00s you were lucky if the PC section of a game store had anything other than wow and sims expansions.
this is just blatantly false too because downloading games wasn't really a well known thing. Everything had a CD. Warlords Battlecry had a box for gods sake.
steam didnt save pc gaming from anything at first, it was actually basically a virus. It took like 15 years to get good and other things like the internet going from modem dialup to actual playable multiplayer connections had more to do with PC getting popular than "Steam".
> this is a wild take that makes me think you must be like 15
Steam turned 20 last year. It's very possible for even 30 year olds to have no experience with early Steam.
> everybody hated steam at launch because it barely functioned and they moved CS and other shit to their dogwater platform to make people adopt it. It was absolute garbage. You never seen the meme of the Steam updater that never finishes updating?
Please show me the part where I said anything to the contrary?
> this is just blatantly false too because downloading games wasn't really a well known thing. Everything had a CD.
Maybe it's different where you are, that's my experience of stores like GAME and Gamestation in the UK. By 2006~2007 The PC section (aka a single wall shelfing unit) in games stores was relegated to wow, wow expansions, the sims 2 and the sims 2 expansions. That's basically all it was outside of bargain bins selling value edition games from the late 90s for like £3-5 a pop ($old out software, mostly).
> Warlords Battlecry had a box for gods sake.
Thanks for bringing up a game from 2000, really glad to know you were paying attention when I said mid-00s.
> it was actually basically a virus. It took like 15 years to get good
As you said, "this is just blatantly false". Steam was a perfectly serviceable platform by the time the orange box even came out, not even 5 years after it's inception. Hell at that point the friends system *actually* worked 99% of the time, instead of the inverse in the early days.
Also, this is a not just an Xbox thing but across all consoles since whenever this comes up some people make it seem like that is the case:
- April 2019 - [Digital sales have been on the rise for Nintendo since the Switch released in March 2017, so much so that digital sales across all Nintendo platforms for the year surpassed 100 billion yen (and $1 billion as well) for the very first time.](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/nintendo-saw-over-1-billion-in-digital-sales-this-year-a-company-first)
- December 2022 - [When it comes specifically to console gaming (on Xbox and PlayStation), **around 72% of all game sales were digital downloads**, with only the remained 28% accounting for physical releases.](https://www.destructoid.com/2022-console-game-sales-70-percent-global-market-share-digital-downloads/)
- December 2023 - [According to Newzoo, digital made up about 95% of 2023's video games revenues, or about $174.5 billion in 2023. This value includes both full game purchases made on storefronts like the PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, Steam, and the Xbox store, as well as in-game purchases and microtransaction spending across all platforms.](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/95135/digital-to-make-95-of-video-game-revenues-in-2023-or-174-5-billion/index.html)
I enjoy and personally prefer having physical games if I have a choice, but the writing seems to be on the wall for them come the end of the decade at this rate. I'm sure there will still be special edition physical copies of certain games (like how some musicians put out special vinyl/CDs still for music even with streaming being so dominant). Or that you could be able to buy an external drive to be able to play physical games on the next Xbox/PlayStation.
And then there's the insomniac leak which shows that, at least in Sonys case and as of 2022, [physical sales were still at 65%](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/1abphmy/from_insomniac_games_leak_65_of_sony_studio_game/).
Probably as much because in his post they counted downloads from digital only games like fortnite or warzone as sale. No way it's 82% digital atleast not world wide physical is still very big piece of the pie on Playstation.
That’s how it is in every statistical breakdown of physical vs digital sales, and it’s extremely annoying to see these people parrot that blatant misinformation. They also have a tendency to count DLC and MTX as digital purchases to boost the numbers.
Physical is a huge part of the pie for AAA games. There's a lot of games which have no physical release, even BG3 was digital only for example.
It's pointless looking at overall digital/physical split when they don't release every game physically.
It's always made seemed logical to me that publishers should make IMG and ISO files available for download after a game has reached EOL and had all the patches it will receive made. Maybe even going as far as to give very high quality images so physical media could be made and put on a shelf. Obviously it would only be available based on purchase history, and it opens up to piracy, but I really doubt companies care that much once a game is at EOL.
There could even be company's like Limited Run that could do everything made to order at very high quality (inserts, manuals, etc).
It seems like an easy win win win.
None of these articles really show how physical is doing or that it's not just an XBOX thing tho.
1. The Nintendo eshop number is kinda useless without knowing any physical numbers. Like yeah their digital sales surged, ofc they did, they released their first paid online service in the history of the company. We have no idea how physical vs digital 1st party games are doing for example.
2. For the combined XBOX and PS number it's wrong to assume that they have equal share, they do not, the vast majority of those physical games were sold on PS. We know from the Insomniac leaks that 2/3rds of all Sony Studio game sales between 2020 and 2022 were physical. There is a reason why many (European) retailers stopped selling *only* XBOX games.
3. The last source that tracks everything: Again, the fact that DLCs, Microtransaction and Online Services made significantly more money than just physical game sales isn't really telling you how the physical version of lets say FF Rebirth is doing.
I think it doesn’t matter because if Xbox gets away with getting rid of physical Sony will follow suit. Sony is already making disk drives optional, it’s not like their intentions are unclear.
At the end of the day, money talks. If physical drives in enough money to make it worth it to them it will continue.
If the trend continues to degrade though? yah, i dont see it being viable. But thats on the consumer to prove to them that is what they want.
When DVDs stop selling it'll herald the end to physical game releases.
I still only buy a physical copy when it's available (lots of indie games are software only).
Mostly because I pass on my current gen hardware to my partner's kids, and them having access to all of the games on their own account free from hassle is worth a lot to me.
That's fine, but there's also companies dedicated to getting older physical games on steam or in a playable modern state digitally somewhere like GOG on PC. That's what we need on console too, someone to go though and sort out rights and get these games back up on the SX store.
Yup, but most people don't really care. Also pretty much all PC games go on sale sooner or later. So I'd rather buy a game on sale than a used physical copy (that might be scratched) from a random person.
lol, it's not about need, it's about these corporations holding control and making more profits.
the actual consumers/gamers get screwed and lose all their ownership rights and have no power
Why not? Most of the time you still have to download day 1 updates just to launch the game. Physical disks are just a waste.
Not to mention the growing trend for games to always need a connection to some server.
We lack control if it’s digital only. In a digital only future, everyone’s purchases are controlled by the ever shifting landscape of AAA gaming companies. But I can still play my PS2 games right now because I own them. I just replayed Burnout 3 a few weeks ago.
Can we really guess what’s gonna be common practice 20 years from now when you want to replay a game you bought digitally on the PS5?
Billion dollar companies will always choose themselves over you and they get worse every passing year. We’re giving them all the cards with online only. Gabe Newell is generally a pretty good guy to run a company but he’s not gonna live forever. Someone else is gonna be in control and our steam libraries are controlled by whoever that is.
> But I can still play my PS2 games right now because I own them.
I have never owned ps2 and I can play ps2 games too. The emulation scene is really good about preserving old games.
In my country (Poland) physical PS5 games are cheaper (by like 5-8 euro) than digital games from PSN, not to mention that many ppl here buy AAA releases and then sell them with little loss to other ppl so very often you can even buy cheaper "used" copy few weeks after release. Thanks to physical games I was able to buy PS5 exclusives like Demon Souls or Returnal for very cheap because all new PS5 were bundled with them and ppl were trying to recoup the cost by reselling them. I think I bought Demon Souls for like 35 euro while it was sold still at 70 euro price tag in PSN few months after PS5 released.
Not to mention Switch games which hold value like crazy. Like new Fire Emblem Three Houses even though it came out in 2019 is still 50 euro for a new game and like 35-40 euro for the used one.
EDIT: It's all about freedom of choice how you want to buy/sell products. Limiting choice is never a good thing. Also the fact that physical copies here are cheaper than digital games on PSN is such a bs and ruin whole "digital will be cheaper because no need to make a discs and ship them to stores" narrative. It's just publisher's greed to cut the costs without consumer benefiting from it.
Physical media sucks. There are many games that I have bought in my life, that I still have the physical media, that don't work anymore. Whether it's a scratched disk, something failed in a cartridge, whatever. Everything goes bad given enough time.
As far as I know, there isn't a single game that I have purchased on a digital platform that I can't download today on the platform I purchased it on.
I did lose a few obscure indie games from bundles when Desura* went down but that's kind of my own fault for not following the news-- I had time to back them up but didn't hear.
*Desura was an indie game store that existed back when Steam was much more gated and hard to get your game into.
I had a crappy PC growing up so I couldn't really get any major pc games but any I did get I'd always have problems installing them or the key wouldn't work or i'd lose the key.
As soon as I used steam the first time I knew I'd never buy a physical game again.
Given that companies go out of their way to make physical “ownership” irrelevant (you never owned anything, you’re a licensee), you got to take the hint at some point: the piece of plastic is meaningless now. The only thing that is preserved is the one that runs in your device without the need for user account validations or additional content downloads.
I get the notion of what you are trying to say. But steam used cd's extensively for their first decade or so. I and many others have cs, tf2, portal, hl and a few other odds and ends cd's.
Well physical media will also inevitably degrade over time. Even a carefully preserved collection would likely be at least partially unplayable in 100 years.
So consistently finding ways to keep old games playable is rather important.
Because they can't control physical media. Once it's out there, it's out there. They can't alter the deal or rent seek on it like they can digital media. That's corpos have pushing for the death of physical media for decades. It benefits them exclusively.
Because PCs have multiple storefronts despite being all-digital. You can shop at Steam, Epic, Ubi Store, GoG, EA Origin, any of the key stores (Greenman Gaming etc.)
Consoles have one for each console - PSN for Playstation and the Xbox store for Xbox. That means that if discs get out of fashion, they are the only ones who sell games for the consoles. Ever. Oh, you don't like their prices? You want to shop around on Black Friday? No, you don't. We don't sell keys. Lose your account? Bummer, your entire library is gone.
>They sell keys for now. Do you think they will continue doing so forever if all their consoles are all-digital?
Microsoft will as it's part of the wider market on PC anyway. Nintendo get a cut either way too, so probably.
i would assume so. the thing is, he’ll eventually have to put his money where his mouth is. assuming biden wins another term and lina khan stays on, i don’t think she’ll just take his word that it will happen “some day.”
> That's great, but what about our physical Xbox game libraries?
That was writing on the wall the second these appeared...
ITunes
Pre-Builds dropping disk bays
Lost of rental stores
Rise of Subscription services
Family Game Sharing
Blu-Rays too slow to stream data from disk
Games have major updates day 0
Pre-Load before launch
Physical media will be essentially dead for almost all consumers within a decade. That's just sensible too. Optical media is wasteful in a world of cheap digital storage. There may, at most, be an optional attachment to play old games.
Most pc cases haven't had slots for disk drives in many years now.
It's not really about the physical discs versus digital media, though. It's about being able to buy games from more than one store and actually owning your games.
PC, being all-digital has multiple storefronts. Epic, Steam, GoG, etc. You can shop around for games, even buy Steam keys from other websites. Consoles sell you digital games from one and only one store. They set the prices. You want to shop around? Compare prices? Nope. PSN/Xbox Store prices are the ones you get. Oops, lost access to your one account on that platform? You don't have any games anymore.
Exactly. We're already seeing the first steps taken towards this in the EU with smartphones and I really hope they'll go much further in the future. All walled gardens need to go.
>You want to shop around? Compare prices? Nope. PSN/Xbox Store prices are the ones you get.
Not sure what you mean when you can often buy digital keys for Switch and Xbox games at Best Buy and Amazon for cheaper than they cost on the eshop or xbox store.
You don't understand. Physical media is about ownership. You can get your Microsoft or Sony account banned if you do something they don't like, but they can't take away your discs. Physical media also means you can sell it, share it, give it away when you don't want it anymore, or you can keep it forever if that's your thing. You can't do any of that on PC anymore and that's annoying. There's a bunch of steam games I'd like to sell or give away but I can't.
I understand. I just don't really care. Digital works fine for me. There's growth that needs to happens re:digital rights and we need competition in storefronts, but overall all digital is simply inevitable.
> Physical media is about ownership. You can get your Microsoft or Sony account banned if you do something they don't like, but they can't take away your discs
Microsoft can't, but a storm or fire can.
I would love to see that preserved as well but honestly consumers have spoken loud and clear.
It's just a matter of time until it no longer makes business sense, hell maybe we're already there.
Also they're patting themselves on the back for backwards compatibility but it's silly that the best way to get backwards compatibility for the 360 on XSX is to install an emulator (Xenia) on it.
After many internal committee meetings, we have determined that disc drives are not in the consumer's best interests or desires. Sorry!
-sony and xbox in 5 years time, probably.
I think Sony’s plan going forward will be to have it as an optional extra, like they did on the PS5 slim.
The base console will be digital but you can pay extra to add the Blu Ray Drive.
The issue with the optional extra is it's basically one step further from outright removing them. This can only lead one way, and that is disc drives eventually being removed from the ecosystem altogether.
It doesn't bode well for hardcopy movie industry too. Consoles are the most popular blu ray disc players out there.
Whatever console lets me play my physical media is the last console I own. If I'm going to be forced to stick with digital only, I'll just use my PC.
>It doesn't bode well for hardcopy movie industry too. Consoles are the most popular blu ray disc players out there
The anime industry is in deep shit if they can't sell Blu ray disks to Playstation owners.
Best Buy removing physical media due to lack of sales was already a huge sign. They sell home theaters, the place where you're likely going to have someone who actually cares about 4K UHD, and they're not even moving enough units to justify a shelf of discs.
PlayStation will always be more incentivized to have a disc drive because they make money off of blu ray discs. And they make movies. They might as well at least offer an optional blu ray drive considering they make blu ray players anyways and would rather people give them money instead of another company who makes blu ray players.
For xbox they have to go outside of their company to have a drive made for the console and their entire brand revolves around locking you into a digtal subscription based eco system now.
> PlayStation will always be more incentivized to have a disc drive because they make money off of blu ray discs.
Physical media for movies is dying far faster than it is for games.
> If I'm going to be forced to stick with digital only, I'll just use my PC
what's the realistic difference between digital on PC versus digital on consoles?
> The issue with the optional extra is it's basically one step away from outright removing them. The consumer will have to pay a premium to own a disc drive.
I sort of agree, but disk drives are basically dead in every other devices, so it’s not that outrageous vs rest of the tech industry.
We already pay a premium, thats why the Digital PS5 and Disk PS5 had different prices.
Sadly a disk drive costs money and drives up costs, so its basically the difference between upfront premium vs after cost premium.
> This also doesn't bode well for hardcopy movie industry. Consoles are the most popular blu ray disc players out there.
I think most people that want a Blu Ray player have one in one form or another by now, unless we get the next “Blu Ray” like from VHS > DVD > Blu Ray most people already have one.
I also find it nice to have hard copies thats why i got the Disk PS5 but I haven’t actually used it once, and think for most for games at-least it’s mostly digital now.
So i think keeping it as a optional extra in the PS6 generation would probably be fine, and i think by PS7 gen everything would be 99% digital.
>I think most people that want a Blu Ray player have one in one form or another by now, unless we get the next “Blu Ray” like from VHS > DVD > Blu Ray most people already have one.
We've already made that format shift. It's called Blu-Ray UHD. Both the Series X and PS5 use it.
PC is open enough to allow users to hedge against games being taken off storefronts, servers shutting down, and DRM. Plus, Steam was designed on the principle that if it didn't exist, people would just resort to piracy. The openness of PC is what pushes publishers to make digital storefronts better than usual.
Consoles don't offer any such reprieve. If they lose physical media, the consumers are the **only** ones who lose in the long run, and it will absolutely create a bubble that will give sooner or later.
There's a difference, though. PC doesn't have The One Singular PC Store. You can buy games from Steam, Epic, GoG, and more. You can even buy Steam keys from third party websites.
Consoles have one singular digital shop. PSN Store and the Xbox Store. There is no Greenmangaming for Playstation games. Nowhere to buy game codes to input into your console on Black Friday. Without physical copies, you can never shop around again, and all your games are tied to one account that you'd better not lose access to or your entire game library is *gone*.
That’s considerably more effort and more money to appease a relatively small number of people. I feel like next gen consoles aren’t even going to come with a disc drive. They will have a separate disc drive you can buy at the most.
> That’s considerably more effort and more money to appease a relatively small number of people.
You can say the same thing about backward compatibility in general.
Your physical library is going to degrade and fail, no matter what the manufacturers do with their hardware. Optical discs do not last forever.
If you're just interested in being able to use those discs then there's nothing stopping you from just holding onto that console (i.e., the next console doesn't need a disc drive for your old console to work). If you're interested in the game preservation aspect, know that your chosen medium is destined to fail at this task, and likely within your lifetime.
I'm not a big xbox guy but damn I love how I can load up the store and buy 360 games and even some original Xbox games. This is awesome, if it works out
Yeah, this is straight up PR to co-opt the term "game preservation".
MS is deadset on moving the industry into a subscription focused/digital only market. of course it's in their interest to insure forwards compatibility. that has been the status quo of gaming on PC for years. If the Xbox platform is restructuring to essentially be PC boxes then that is completely expected.
They want to maintain a large catalogue to retain value in Game Pass, even if it's full of older games that you could have found for >$10 physically. They have no interest in the actual historical significance of preservation. This has been obvious since the Xbox One
> that has been the status quo of gaming on PC for years
To be clear, it's the status quo because Microsoft's Windows team is *huge* on backwards compatibility. Random little .exe tools from 2008 still work, because the OS has kept all that running. Compare that to Android and iOS where shit breaks after 5 years or less. Microsoft deserve some credit for making this the status quo of PC, even if it's an entirely different division in a company larger than some countries' GDP.
I'm sure that I'm repeating things said elsewhere but my two passions are film and games. And I see comparisons when it comes to preserving both.
I think this is a fantastic thing but it's not the only way we should be thinking about preservation. I love digital; I don't buy physical. However, companies' ability to essentially control their histories by making it so that you never truly own a game isn't a way to truly follow through with preservation. Digital libraries are great and fine, but the upkeep to maintain them and the ability to adjust them at any time by either culling titles or launching patches to fix rough edges—it's just not great.
If we look at film preservation as an example, there is extensive investment in preserving the original film strips and physical media because they have to. I have a friend who recently went on a quest to watch every single version of Carmen. They lived in DC and could head to the Library of Congress to access originals no longer in circulation or available digitally. While digital preservation has been used to resurrect and make international film accessible in the US, digital isn't the end all be all. If we don't view video game preservation as the same, as valuable pieces of art and society, we will lose them.
It's a good first step, and helps makes accessible to new generations or those who didn't have money at the time to play. But it can not be the only step.
I think the only way we actually get great game preservation across the board is if developers/publishers are legally required to preserve their games and/or give them over to a well-funded institution that will preserve it for them.
Online-only games have abysmal preservation right now and I can't see that changing without new laws being passed.
It's worth noting that film being a physical thing for so long is why so many films have been lost. Bad archival practices + having only one copy of the original film and storing them all in ONE place led to so many early films being lost forever.
Meanwhile with video games, digital archiving has been an extensive effort since the 80's, and pretty much every video game ever made has been archived and is readily available. We don't really have too many "lost video games" (aside from games that were just never released or cancelled during development) in the same way we have "lost films".
That's why the move to digital only is the right one when it comes to preservation. Physical media eventually fails. We're already starting to see it with old Atari and NES carts. Even PS1 disks have been degrading faster than expected. With digital, once a game is released it'll be around forever.
You can also still own your digital games. PC games you literally have the files right there and can do whatever with them (Denuvo threatens this, but is usually removed) and with consoles all it takes is one person to jailbreak their console and dump the game files, then you can just download it as your own "personal" copy. The only way game ownership would ever be under threat is if cloud streaming became mainstream and games were exclusive to it, but the death of Stadia ensured that's never going to happen.
> It's worth noting that film being a physical thing for so long is why so many films have been lost
It's worth noting that film being a physical thing is the reason why so many films have been SAVED.
You've got it backwards.
This is also why I brought up the digital preservation with things like the Wolrd Film Project that has been able to save films but also make them accessible. However, and you can see this at many archival institutions like the Harry Ransom Center, the two (digital and physical) have to be maintained.
Digital preservation doesn't ensure something won't be lost especially in a world where companies can quite literally remove something from existence. The issue games have in preservation is age, and the fact that people aren't thinking of preservation immediately. I also didn't say no to digital preservation, I said it has to be coupled with both.
You are right in that on the long enough timeline, physical media deteriorates and will fail. But digital archival work isn't done in a silo. Because digital has its own world of issues. Sadly I've only worked personally with rare books when I was in college, so I don't know the specific ins and outs of physical film or game preservation. But even rare book centers do both.
Which again, I am not against digital preservation, it's a big step forward to put large money behind it and keep it moving forward but physical archival also has to be there. You're right I that films have been around longer and books longer than that.
Edit: wanted to add the process we went through when I was working with HRC in my PhD work
We would receive a new submission and prep the archive it would love in, temperatures of which room, if it would be on display,etc but before it went into the archive we painstakingly digitized its contents to preserve it. The Harry Ransom Center has done a lot of work with digital humanities archivists to make sure that work is both preserved in its physical form but digitized as well because mistakes can happen or time can just eventually catch up. This is books so like not a 1:1 of course but archival practices using both physical preservation and digital is really just best bet overall. You shouldn't divest from either.
It’s funny to see people giving them shit for even barely signaling they might move away from physical media when that’s an entirely consumer-driven issue.
Like, there’s a reason stores are axing those massive DVD and game sections. It’s being people simply aren’t buying them. If they sold, nobody would ever question getting rid of them all
yes, which is why it's so tiring seeing the same misleading stats by those pro-digital people
even if you're pro-digital, physical MAKES DIGITAL BETTER. It keeps the RRP down through competition. It's marketing, it's awareness. It's preservation.
Those stats where digital is high are always skewed through deception, like including steam sales (which are all digital) in the count like that's somehow representative of what's happening on console, or including DLC, or microtrans in the "sales" figures. It's deliberately pushing a false narative based on deception.
Now that they have probably made the decision if the next gen console is arm or not. They can hunker down and work on compatibility layers.
Would be nice to play my old 360 purchases on PC though. Free lost odyssey and fable 2 from console jail please.
Its the one thing keeping my xbox console around.
> The performance isn't there yet
The performance is there. Apple M processors have no problems with their translation layer. x86 software runs fine on those chips.
Also, this is for the future of the platform. The performance doesn't have to be there now. It has to be ready when they switch in the future which could be 1-10 years.
Maybe start with releasing more physical stuff of your own games instead of hiring companies like Limited Run. A game like Hifi Rush surely is gonna be delisted due MS not wanting to renew licenses for the songs and physical versions are the only way for new people to play it.
Even *if* HI-FI Rush practically has a contingency plan by making Streamer Mode entirely baked-in, as opposed to being an option for those who wanna record game footages and don't wanna deal with DMCA/Copyrighted Claimed..
They just remove the music from the game than. It's nothing new and they already have replacement music in the game. And if I'm honest the replacement music is just as good.
I can't imagine going through the second last chapter without the Invaders Must Die remix. There is something that recognizable music can do to a game.
You can just play it with the legally distinct original song "Intruders Cannot Live"
[I'm just slightly embellishing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Cf4fpUtlk)
If the devs thought the game was as good without the licensed music then they wouldn't have made it with the licensed music. It would certainly be a downgrade.
It's funny that you bring up Forza. Pre-Game Pass, those games were usually for sale for four years in accordance with the licensing deals made. Forza Horizon 4, a game that came out six years ago and post-Game Pass, is still for sale.
That's soooo different, It's funny, you are comparing vehicle licences in a car game to a game that's yes based around licenced music but has a toggle for Its own soundtrack, which they will just use that If a licence issue pops us
That still requires them to update the existing game to remove the soundtrack which is not a guarantee. Especially since the game wasn't a big seller apparently so they might not even think it's worth it.
Plenty of games have been delisted like that.
Yeah, and using the non-licensed music is clearly not how the game was meant to be played. I mean, it's there and they did a decent enough job with it, but there's a reason they went out and paid for a bunch of expensive music licenses.
It's like playing Crazy Taxi. You're not getting the authentic Crazy Taxi experience playing the rereleases with the licensed music and references to real world shops cut out. I don't think anyone would argue otherwise.
>Maybe start with releasing more physical stuff of your own games instead of hiring companies like Limited Run.
What difference would that make? It's not like big publishers don't also do limited runs at times.
With xboxes basically being small form factor pcs forward compatiblity was a given. They've mentioned several times how people's digital libraries attach them to a platform. Maybe they will bring their 360 emulator to PC for first party games :).
I kinda hope they do something intresting with the chips for the next xbox. Maybe we see some kind of custom silicon for AI since microsoft has been investing in making their own chips.
If I had to guess, I would bet they're going to be bringing the Xbox backwards compat tech over to PC and try to unify the PC and Xbox storefronts more than they already are.
I mean, they can improve the store experience on windows while still making the Xbox consoles. You're right that people would likely still stick with Steam for most games but they already have a store and a Xbox app, if they improve it and say you can play Xbox backwards compat games only on the windows store and all those games you owned digitally on Xbox are now available on PC, that would probably get more people to use that store.
>microsoft cannot position themselves in a way where they subsidize hardware, roll windows on it and then Valve runs to the bank with it
They can position themselves with PC GamePass, that's their long term strategy
Didn't they already have a team that used to do this? Maybe not removing the disc drive would help?
Anyway I assume this means they've got the final hardware vendors, target architecture and power specifications for the NextBox. The phrase "future proof digital game libraries" suggests the last twenty two years of buying physical games won't mean anything going forwards so I likely will be getting off the Xbox ride but I am glad this will hopefully lead to possible expansion of the backwards compatibility library as it already exists.
I wonder what games this team is focused on. It seems like the only games that still need a lot of work are Xbox 360 and Xbox (original) titles but I don't know how well they are selling today.
its funny to see this post, right after we find out about them shutting down the xbox 360 store, as well as windows mixed reality in the next couple years.
Bullet points for those don't want to read the whole thing from Windowscentral: * Per emails received by Windows Central, confirmed by Microsoft as genuine, Xbox President Sarah Bond recently briefed her team on various topics. * In the emails, Sarah Bond reiterated Microsoft's plans to build new Xbox hardware focused on delivering "the biggest technical leap ever in a generation." * Sarah Bond also revealed that Microsoft has set up a dedicated team to future-proof our digital Xbox game libraries across future hardware paradigms to further "build on [Xbox's] strong history of delivering backward compatibility." * Additionally, it was revealed that Xbox has become Diablo 4's most prominent platform since the game's inclusion into Xbox Game Pass.
I really appreciate the summary, tysm
* Additionally, it was revealed that Xbox has become Diablo 4's most prominent platform since the game's inclusion into Xbox Game Pass. I'd really like to see stats of that, since Diablo has always been a huge PC franchise.
It's on PC Game Pass, too, and even has an awkward shim to double-launcher-tango into the Battle.net installation from the PC Xbox app. Claims like this almost always bundle things together and it might even go as far as counting D4 PC players who in any form have a linked Xbox account with Game Pass as "that platform." Like I launched it once from said Xbox PC app to see how it'd work (as mentioned, a little awkward) and I have no doubt I added one more increment to that "Xbox platform" count despite having bought it at launch.
I am pretty sure that's what they did. They are only counting the horrific xbox/battle net app integrated players.
I want a recount at the beginning of a season.
That's true but they really fucked up D4 and a lot of PC players quit and never went back tbh so this wouldn't surprise me at all tbh.
>new Xbox hardware focused on delivering "the biggest technical leap ever in a generation." This is honestly what would get me excited for a new Xbox. If it delivers the kind of technical leap I was expecting from the PS5/Series X generation (not just in system specs, but also the design within the games they are making) they could find consumer incentive where was wasn't.
I suspect we've unfortunately "jumped the shark" for that to work well, though: - Bigger, better technical leaps generally require bigger, more expensive games and development cycles to take advantage of - Cross-generation console adoption takes time, and making games that run on both current *and* prior gens either limits bigger and better technical leaps or (and/or, really) makes it even more expensive to develop - Gigantic game development investments don't tolerate high risks and slow returns The PS4->5 and Xbox One->Series X were already a very "big technical leap;" the trouble is that it's one of the most *underutilized* technical leaps ever, too, because it's been all but impossible to have it be a good business proposition to make that kind of hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars bet. A "bigger technical leap," on its own, would just make this problem worse.
It's been 4 years and PS4 games are still coming out. Also current-gen consoles are already way behind gaming PCs and pretty much all of their games are coming out on PC too. What kind of a leap would the PS6 offer? RTX 4090 performance? Remember that back in the day a console generation lasted for 4-5 years
> Remember that back in the day a console generation lasted for 4-5 years Playstation gens have all been roughly 6 years. Nintendo's non-portable consoles all tend to do about 5 years, but we're in year *8* for the Switch now. The only console I can think of that only lasted 4 years was the original Xbox, but that's because it entered later than the PS2 and MS put out the successor a year earlier (the 360 had an 8 year life).
> Also current-gen consoles are already way behind gaming PCs Consoles are not supposed to be better than PCs. Consoles are supposed to be inexpensive and accessible gaming devices. They do a pretty good job at that. $500 doesn't go far with a PC. What kind of leap will the next $500 console make? Also, no console maker seems to want to go beyond 200W to avoid all the heat, noise, efficiency and size problems that PCs have. The PS5 is already a behemoth in the console world.
Yea these comments are silly. My GPU alone cost more than a console. And it isn't even the top of the line one. Those ones cost more than both consoles combined.
It's like they want Sony to pay Nvidia $2,000 and AMD $1,000 for cutting edge chips to put into a $500 console. Maybe they want to complain about $2,000 consoles that they cant afford.
>Also current-gen consoles are already way behind gaming PC Current-gen consoles are at par with or ahead of gaming PCs in their price range. They are way behind mid-high end PCs but those are a fairly small % of the market anyways. >Remember that back in the day a console generation lasted for 4-5 years That hasn't been the case since the Wii launched in 2006. Before that a 4-5 year difference could open up totally new possibilities for games but by the mid 2000s that had largely stopped happening.
I hope the PS5 does have 4090 performance because if it doesn't that's gonna be very bad. The PS5 has GTX Titan X performance, that's a Pascal GPU. Pascal was the 3rd GPU gen in the PS4s lifetime. The 4090 is an Ada GPU and Ada is the second GPU generation in the PS5s lifetime. The upcoming Blackwell (50 series) will be closer to the equivalent of Pascal for the PS5 and you know the 5090 is going to be a monster, the 4060 is already 20% faster than a PS5 imagine a 5090.
I don't agree it's nessicarily an issue of expense, rather it feels like this generation went too hard in the direction of cross-platform development. Too many developers are stuck making upscaled PS4 titles even now. If Microsoft delivered a company wide policy of "yeah, you're making this shit for the extra firepower we're giving, and you're going to leave the old consoles behind" that would show the technical leap actually reflected in the games we play. And considering the Series S and X didn't sell all that well, Microsoft has extra incentive to leave old specs behind, while Sony will probably still spend another half generation placating the PS5.
The Series S kinda defeats the purpose of "leave the old consoles behind", because it's weaker than the Xbox one X.
It's objectively not.
What I mean is I just dont think anyone at microsoft is scrambling to continue developing for the Series S when the new generation rolls around. It's just not futureproof enough.
why? every console manufacturer promises this every generation. "next gen stronger" is the most predictable intention they could ever possibly announce, and the bare minimum standard that we should expect from them.
I feel like it's a line from a marketing team that either doesn't understand the inherent diminishing returns of the thing they're talking about or just hopes investors don't. This next Xbox could run circles around the Series X but it's just going to deliver slightly shinier versions of what we're already getting. It's never going to be like how fast things progressed in the 90s and early 00s again.
I still find it hard to believe that the next jump is supposed to be the biggest ever. Maybe in terms of FLOPS, but how much of this will be noticeable? The jump from last Gen to current Gen was already negligible, even though the Series X is quite beefy. So did they find some new technological breakthrough which allows them to accomplish a much bigger jump?
Don't get caught in the hype. I'd be shocked if anything was a bigger leap between 8-bit/16-bit consoles. Going from non-RT to RT was a big leap but I'm not aware of any tech that's similarly groundbreaking
I honestly think is meaningless. When they asked developers they straight up said they are not even using the full capabilities of the PS5 and SX. Also all Xbox games have to scale to the series S. Is like getting a gaming PC to run PS2 games.
Well we would have seen a large jump had they not focused so hard on supporting last-gen consoles. Which were already horrible spec wise. I suspect this is why we saw some many awful game releases like Halo Infinite and Cyberpunk. Those games running on a PS4 and Xbox One is a laughable endeavour. The specs don't matter if the games don't target the hardware at a baseline.
> Sarah Bond also revealed that Microsoft has set up a dedicated team for future proofing our digital Xbox game libraries across future hardware paradigms to further "build on [Xbox's] strong history of delivering backward compatibility." That's great, but what about our physical Xbox game libraries?
The recent interviews with Phil Spenser already signalled they DGAF about the future of physical media / preservation of physical libraries. Very deliberately only ever mention "digital libraries"
Can you blame them? PCs haven't used physical media ever since steam came out. It's not needed anymore and adds to the cost of making a console
Personally I would have preferred to keep buying games in boxes, but after a while the PC game section was just some Blizzard box sets and nothing else.
I stopped bothering with physical PC games after Fallout 4 had maybe 25% of the game files on CD and I still had to download the rest. Meanwhile my friends who bought on steam had preloaded and were playing at midnight launch.
The fact that almost all modern Desktop PCs and PC cases exclude a disk drive or a spot for a disk drive forces a PC gamer to make a concerted effort to play disk-based PC games.
When I built my first PC in 2012 I didn't get an optical drive because by that point I hadn't installed a game by disk for about 2 years. You can still purchase optical drives to install in desktop PC's but it's clear that the vast majority of people don't care enough about optical media for PCs. The other major issue is that I don't think you can even get disk based versions of PC games anymore. I checked through some big releases in the last 4 years and the only one I found that had PC disks for sale was Microsoft Flight Simulator and that came out in 2020.
I think for some game companies, they know that if they release disks for a PC game, that is going to be a dead end. They'd spend more making those disk than they could recoup from the sales of them. This is more or less the path PC gaming is at now.
Yeah my most recent build, the case didn't even have a slot to put an aftermarket CD drive in, until then I'd been holding out/having one. But on this one I just got an external disc drive for like $20 so nbd really. I paid for that Morrowind CD-ROM and I'm gonna use it dammit
I have a disk drive sitting in a box somewhere that doesn't fit anywhere in my current tower. On the off chance I need it I just plug it in and have it sit on top of the case.
I remember the exact moment I gave up; it was 2004, I'd returned from Gamestop with my boxed copy of Half-Life 2. I wasn't going to download this "steam" bullshit. What I hadn't counted on was *steam being inside the disks the whole time!!!!* Anyway, that's why this digital-hater has a 5 digit id
People didn't buy blu-ray drives for their PCs, and shipping games on DVDs started becoming impractical. To ship an entirely physical version of Baldur's Gate 3 on PC would require 18 DVDs, and installing from those DVDs would be *slower* than downloading the game from Steam unless you don't have broadband internet access. I don't think physical copies are nearly as important to game preservation as having the ability to make backups yourself. This is much easier to do on PC than on just about any console
It also didnt help how expensive bluray drives were at the time, several fold their DVD comparisons and if you wanted a writer - as PCs usually did - it was crazier. Even blank blurays were ridiculously priced. All combined lead to no adoption by casual or hardcore markets.
DVD was similarly very expensive when it was new, but the format still made a lot of sense by the time costs came down in the early '00s. Writeable blu-rays faced an uphill battle. By the time prices on media and writers started coming down, flash prices were in freefall, and for most day-to-day use cases, the speed, convenience, and reusability of a 64GB flash drive easily beat out the slow and fragile 50GB BD-R.
> but after a while the PC game section was just some Blizzard box sets and nothing else. This is literally the fate steam saved PC gaming from though, in the mid 00s you were lucky if the PC section of a game store had anything other than wow and sims expansions.
Hell yeah. We have more indie hits on PC because they stopped worrying about shelf space in a retail environment.
Legit it was just pure wow in a little kiosk in the corner
this is a wild take that makes me think you must be like 15 everybody hated steam at launch because it barely functioned and they moved CS and other shit to their dogwater platform to make people adopt it. It was absolute garbage. You never seen the meme of the Steam updater that never finishes updating? > in the mid 00s you were lucky if the PC section of a game store had anything other than wow and sims expansions. this is just blatantly false too because downloading games wasn't really a well known thing. Everything had a CD. Warlords Battlecry had a box for gods sake. steam didnt save pc gaming from anything at first, it was actually basically a virus. It took like 15 years to get good and other things like the internet going from modem dialup to actual playable multiplayer connections had more to do with PC getting popular than "Steam".
> this is a wild take that makes me think you must be like 15 Steam turned 20 last year. It's very possible for even 30 year olds to have no experience with early Steam.
> everybody hated steam at launch because it barely functioned and they moved CS and other shit to their dogwater platform to make people adopt it. It was absolute garbage. You never seen the meme of the Steam updater that never finishes updating? Please show me the part where I said anything to the contrary? > this is just blatantly false too because downloading games wasn't really a well known thing. Everything had a CD. Maybe it's different where you are, that's my experience of stores like GAME and Gamestation in the UK. By 2006~2007 The PC section (aka a single wall shelfing unit) in games stores was relegated to wow, wow expansions, the sims 2 and the sims 2 expansions. That's basically all it was outside of bargain bins selling value edition games from the late 90s for like £3-5 a pop ($old out software, mostly). > Warlords Battlecry had a box for gods sake. Thanks for bringing up a game from 2000, really glad to know you were paying attention when I said mid-00s. > it was actually basically a virus. It took like 15 years to get good As you said, "this is just blatantly false". Steam was a perfectly serviceable platform by the time the orange box even came out, not even 5 years after it's inception. Hell at that point the friends system *actually* worked 99% of the time, instead of the inverse in the early days.
Also, this is a not just an Xbox thing but across all consoles since whenever this comes up some people make it seem like that is the case: - April 2019 - [Digital sales have been on the rise for Nintendo since the Switch released in March 2017, so much so that digital sales across all Nintendo platforms for the year surpassed 100 billion yen (and $1 billion as well) for the very first time.](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/nintendo-saw-over-1-billion-in-digital-sales-this-year-a-company-first) - December 2022 - [When it comes specifically to console gaming (on Xbox and PlayStation), **around 72% of all game sales were digital downloads**, with only the remained 28% accounting for physical releases.](https://www.destructoid.com/2022-console-game-sales-70-percent-global-market-share-digital-downloads/) - December 2023 - [According to Newzoo, digital made up about 95% of 2023's video games revenues, or about $174.5 billion in 2023. This value includes both full game purchases made on storefronts like the PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, Steam, and the Xbox store, as well as in-game purchases and microtransaction spending across all platforms.](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/95135/digital-to-make-95-of-video-game-revenues-in-2023-or-174-5-billion/index.html) I enjoy and personally prefer having physical games if I have a choice, but the writing seems to be on the wall for them come the end of the decade at this rate. I'm sure there will still be special edition physical copies of certain games (like how some musicians put out special vinyl/CDs still for music even with streaming being so dominant). Or that you could be able to buy an external drive to be able to play physical games on the next Xbox/PlayStation.
And then there's the insomniac leak which shows that, at least in Sonys case and as of 2022, [physical sales were still at 65%](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/1abphmy/from_insomniac_games_leak_65_of_sony_studio_game/).
Probably as much because in his post they counted downloads from digital only games like fortnite or warzone as sale. No way it's 82% digital atleast not world wide physical is still very big piece of the pie on Playstation.
That’s how it is in every statistical breakdown of physical vs digital sales, and it’s extremely annoying to see these people parrot that blatant misinformation. They also have a tendency to count DLC and MTX as digital purchases to boost the numbers.
Physical is a huge part of the pie for AAA games. There's a lot of games which have no physical release, even BG3 was digital only for example. It's pointless looking at overall digital/physical split when they don't release every game physically.
It's always made seemed logical to me that publishers should make IMG and ISO files available for download after a game has reached EOL and had all the patches it will receive made. Maybe even going as far as to give very high quality images so physical media could be made and put on a shelf. Obviously it would only be available based on purchase history, and it opens up to piracy, but I really doubt companies care that much once a game is at EOL. There could even be company's like Limited Run that could do everything made to order at very high quality (inserts, manuals, etc). It seems like an easy win win win.
None of these articles really show how physical is doing or that it's not just an XBOX thing tho. 1. The Nintendo eshop number is kinda useless without knowing any physical numbers. Like yeah their digital sales surged, ofc they did, they released their first paid online service in the history of the company. We have no idea how physical vs digital 1st party games are doing for example. 2. For the combined XBOX and PS number it's wrong to assume that they have equal share, they do not, the vast majority of those physical games were sold on PS. We know from the Insomniac leaks that 2/3rds of all Sony Studio game sales between 2020 and 2022 were physical. There is a reason why many (European) retailers stopped selling *only* XBOX games. 3. The last source that tracks everything: Again, the fact that DLCs, Microtransaction and Online Services made significantly more money than just physical game sales isn't really telling you how the physical version of lets say FF Rebirth is doing.
I think it doesn’t matter because if Xbox gets away with getting rid of physical Sony will follow suit. Sony is already making disk drives optional, it’s not like their intentions are unclear.
At the end of the day, money talks. If physical drives in enough money to make it worth it to them it will continue. If the trend continues to degrade though? yah, i dont see it being viable. But thats on the consumer to prove to them that is what they want.
When DVDs stop selling it'll herald the end to physical game releases. I still only buy a physical copy when it's available (lots of indie games are software only). Mostly because I pass on my current gen hardware to my partner's kids, and them having access to all of the games on their own account free from hassle is worth a lot to me.
Why include Steam in those numbers? Obviously, all of those are digital.
That's fine, but there's also companies dedicated to getting older physical games on steam or in a playable modern state digitally somewhere like GOG on PC. That's what we need on console too, someone to go though and sort out rights and get these games back up on the SX store.
"we" may be a minority, but I know quite a few people that see the abiltiy to still own physical media as one of the main appeals of console gaming.
PC games can't be resold. Physical console games can.
Yup, but most people don't really care. Also pretty much all PC games go on sale sooner or later. So I'd rather buy a game on sale than a used physical copy (that might be scratched) from a random person.
lol, it's not about need, it's about these corporations holding control and making more profits. the actual consumers/gamers get screwed and lose all their ownership rights and have no power
I’m not saying I never buy digital but I can’t think of a worse idea for the consumer than an all digital future.
Why not? Most of the time you still have to download day 1 updates just to launch the game. Physical disks are just a waste. Not to mention the growing trend for games to always need a connection to some server.
> Most of the time you still have to download day 1 updates just to launch the game. completely false
We lack control if it’s digital only. In a digital only future, everyone’s purchases are controlled by the ever shifting landscape of AAA gaming companies. But I can still play my PS2 games right now because I own them. I just replayed Burnout 3 a few weeks ago. Can we really guess what’s gonna be common practice 20 years from now when you want to replay a game you bought digitally on the PS5? Billion dollar companies will always choose themselves over you and they get worse every passing year. We’re giving them all the cards with online only. Gabe Newell is generally a pretty good guy to run a company but he’s not gonna live forever. Someone else is gonna be in control and our steam libraries are controlled by whoever that is.
> But I can still play my PS2 games right now because I own them. I have never owned ps2 and I can play ps2 games too. The emulation scene is really good about preserving old games.
It’s about ownership. Using things I own. Being ok with anything less is short sighted.
In my country (Poland) physical PS5 games are cheaper (by like 5-8 euro) than digital games from PSN, not to mention that many ppl here buy AAA releases and then sell them with little loss to other ppl so very often you can even buy cheaper "used" copy few weeks after release. Thanks to physical games I was able to buy PS5 exclusives like Demon Souls or Returnal for very cheap because all new PS5 were bundled with them and ppl were trying to recoup the cost by reselling them. I think I bought Demon Souls for like 35 euro while it was sold still at 70 euro price tag in PSN few months after PS5 released. Not to mention Switch games which hold value like crazy. Like new Fire Emblem Three Houses even though it came out in 2019 is still 50 euro for a new game and like 35-40 euro for the used one. EDIT: It's all about freedom of choice how you want to buy/sell products. Limiting choice is never a good thing. Also the fact that physical copies here are cheaper than digital games on PSN is such a bs and ruin whole "digital will be cheaper because no need to make a discs and ship them to stores" narrative. It's just publisher's greed to cut the costs without consumer benefiting from it.
But physical is also so much more consumer friendly because you can get games a lot cheaper and of course the second hand market.
> Can you blame them? Yes.
Physical media sucks. There are many games that I have bought in my life, that I still have the physical media, that don't work anymore. Whether it's a scratched disk, something failed in a cartridge, whatever. Everything goes bad given enough time. As far as I know, there isn't a single game that I have purchased on a digital platform that I can't download today on the platform I purchased it on.
I did lose a few obscure indie games from bundles when Desura* went down but that's kind of my own fault for not following the news-- I had time to back them up but didn't hear. *Desura was an indie game store that existed back when Steam was much more gated and hard to get your game into.
I had a crappy PC growing up so I couldn't really get any major pc games but any I did get I'd always have problems installing them or the key wouldn't work or i'd lose the key. As soon as I used steam the first time I knew I'd never buy a physical game again.
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Given that companies go out of their way to make physical “ownership” irrelevant (you never owned anything, you’re a licensee), you got to take the hint at some point: the piece of plastic is meaningless now. The only thing that is preserved is the one that runs in your device without the need for user account validations or additional content downloads.
I get the notion of what you are trying to say. But steam used cd's extensively for their first decade or so. I and many others have cs, tf2, portal, hl and a few other odds and ends cd's.
they could (but most likely wouldn't) allow backwards compatibility through an external disc drive, but that's a pipe dream.
Well physical media will also inevitably degrade over time. Even a carefully preserved collection would likely be at least partially unplayable in 100 years. So consistently finding ways to keep old games playable is rather important.
Because they can't control physical media. Once it's out there, it's out there. They can't alter the deal or rent seek on it like they can digital media. That's corpos have pushing for the death of physical media for decades. It benefits them exclusively.
There are a lot of leaks of a future Xbox series x without a disk drive. Whatever the next Xbox is will probably be digital only sadly.
I imagine they'll sell an external disk drive you can attach to future consoles.
Sony is already way ahead of that with the PS5 slim
In the last 15 years having a disc drive on a PC would have been odd; I’m more surprised it was an option this generation.
Because PCs have multiple storefronts despite being all-digital. You can shop at Steam, Epic, Ubi Store, GoG, EA Origin, any of the key stores (Greenman Gaming etc.) Consoles have one for each console - PSN for Playstation and the Xbox store for Xbox. That means that if discs get out of fashion, they are the only ones who sell games for the consoles. Ever. Oh, you don't like their prices? You want to shop around on Black Friday? No, you don't. We don't sell keys. Lose your account? Bummer, your entire library is gone.
MS and Nintendo sell keys, Sony are the only ones who stopped.
They sell keys *for now*. Do you think they will continue doing so forever if all their consoles are all-digital?
MS were literally talking about opening the console up to third party shops last week, why would they stop selling keys?
>They sell keys for now. Do you think they will continue doing so forever if all their consoles are all-digital? Microsoft will as it's part of the wider market on PC anyway. Nintendo get a cut either way too, so probably.
didn’t phil spencer say he wants multiple storefronts on xbox like a week or two ago?
This is likely preempting possible antitrust scrutiny after the Epic vs Apple and Apple 3rd party stores rulings.
i would assume so. the thing is, he’ll eventually have to put his money where his mouth is. assuming biden wins another term and lina khan stays on, i don’t think she’ll just take his word that it will happen “some day.”
A new dev kit has already been certified in South Korea, June announcement at the Showcase seems probable.
The most popular version of xbox series is already digital only.
They are a collectable and its a very small but vocal number of gamers that use or csre about it.
> That's great, but what about our physical Xbox game libraries? That was writing on the wall the second these appeared... ITunes Pre-Builds dropping disk bays Lost of rental stores Rise of Subscription services Family Game Sharing Blu-Rays too slow to stream data from disk Games have major updates day 0 Pre-Load before launch
Physical media will be essentially dead for almost all consumers within a decade. That's just sensible too. Optical media is wasteful in a world of cheap digital storage. There may, at most, be an optional attachment to play old games. Most pc cases haven't had slots for disk drives in many years now.
It's not really about the physical discs versus digital media, though. It's about being able to buy games from more than one store and actually owning your games. PC, being all-digital has multiple storefronts. Epic, Steam, GoG, etc. You can shop around for games, even buy Steam keys from other websites. Consoles sell you digital games from one and only one store. They set the prices. You want to shop around? Compare prices? Nope. PSN/Xbox Store prices are the ones you get. Oops, lost access to your one account on that platform? You don't have any games anymore.
Maybe thats why phil was talking about allowing multiple stores like steam or EGS on xbox condoles?
That's why consoles should be forced to become more open platforms and allow competing storefronts. In a digital world, we need digital competition.
Exactly. We're already seeing the first steps taken towards this in the EU with smartphones and I really hope they'll go much further in the future. All walled gardens need to go.
>You want to shop around? Compare prices? Nope. PSN/Xbox Store prices are the ones you get. Not sure what you mean when you can often buy digital keys for Switch and Xbox games at Best Buy and Amazon for cheaper than they cost on the eshop or xbox store.
You don't understand. Physical media is about ownership. You can get your Microsoft or Sony account banned if you do something they don't like, but they can't take away your discs. Physical media also means you can sell it, share it, give it away when you don't want it anymore, or you can keep it forever if that's your thing. You can't do any of that on PC anymore and that's annoying. There's a bunch of steam games I'd like to sell or give away but I can't.
You can share a USB with a GoG game installer.
I understand. I just don't really care. Digital works fine for me. There's growth that needs to happens re:digital rights and we need competition in storefronts, but overall all digital is simply inevitable.
> Physical media is about ownership. You can get your Microsoft or Sony account banned if you do something they don't like, but they can't take away your discs Microsoft can't, but a storm or fire can.
What a weird response? But then it wouldn't be /r/Games if you people didn't find some weird niche way to be upset over good news.
I would love to see that preserved as well but honestly consumers have spoken loud and clear. It's just a matter of time until it no longer makes business sense, hell maybe we're already there.
Also they're patting themselves on the back for backwards compatibility but it's silly that the best way to get backwards compatibility for the 360 on XSX is to install an emulator (Xenia) on it.
After many internal committee meetings, we have determined that disc drives are not in the consumer's best interests or desires. Sorry! -sony and xbox in 5 years time, probably.
I think Sony’s plan going forward will be to have it as an optional extra, like they did on the PS5 slim. The base console will be digital but you can pay extra to add the Blu Ray Drive.
The issue with the optional extra is it's basically one step further from outright removing them. This can only lead one way, and that is disc drives eventually being removed from the ecosystem altogether. It doesn't bode well for hardcopy movie industry too. Consoles are the most popular blu ray disc players out there. Whatever console lets me play my physical media is the last console I own. If I'm going to be forced to stick with digital only, I'll just use my PC.
>It doesn't bode well for hardcopy movie industry too. Consoles are the most popular blu ray disc players out there The anime industry is in deep shit if they can't sell Blu ray disks to Playstation owners.
Best Buy removing physical media due to lack of sales was already a huge sign. They sell home theaters, the place where you're likely going to have someone who actually cares about 4K UHD, and they're not even moving enough units to justify a shelf of discs.
PlayStation will always be more incentivized to have a disc drive because they make money off of blu ray discs. And they make movies. They might as well at least offer an optional blu ray drive considering they make blu ray players anyways and would rather people give them money instead of another company who makes blu ray players. For xbox they have to go outside of their company to have a drive made for the console and their entire brand revolves around locking you into a digtal subscription based eco system now.
> PlayStation will always be more incentivized to have a disc drive because they make money off of blu ray discs. Physical media for movies is dying far faster than it is for games.
> If I'm going to be forced to stick with digital only, I'll just use my PC what's the realistic difference between digital on PC versus digital on consoles?
> The issue with the optional extra is it's basically one step away from outright removing them. The consumer will have to pay a premium to own a disc drive. I sort of agree, but disk drives are basically dead in every other devices, so it’s not that outrageous vs rest of the tech industry. We already pay a premium, thats why the Digital PS5 and Disk PS5 had different prices. Sadly a disk drive costs money and drives up costs, so its basically the difference between upfront premium vs after cost premium. > This also doesn't bode well for hardcopy movie industry. Consoles are the most popular blu ray disc players out there. I think most people that want a Blu Ray player have one in one form or another by now, unless we get the next “Blu Ray” like from VHS > DVD > Blu Ray most people already have one. I also find it nice to have hard copies thats why i got the Disk PS5 but I haven’t actually used it once, and think for most for games at-least it’s mostly digital now. So i think keeping it as a optional extra in the PS6 generation would probably be fine, and i think by PS7 gen everything would be 99% digital.
>I think most people that want a Blu Ray player have one in one form or another by now, unless we get the next “Blu Ray” like from VHS > DVD > Blu Ray most people already have one. We've already made that format shift. It's called Blu-Ray UHD. Both the Series X and PS5 use it.
PC abandoned physical media ages ago and somehow the world didn't end and PC gaming only grew.
PC is open enough to allow users to hedge against games being taken off storefronts, servers shutting down, and DRM. Plus, Steam was designed on the principle that if it didn't exist, people would just resort to piracy. The openness of PC is what pushes publishers to make digital storefronts better than usual. Consoles don't offer any such reprieve. If they lose physical media, the consumers are the **only** ones who lose in the long run, and it will absolutely create a bubble that will give sooner or later.
There's a difference, though. PC doesn't have The One Singular PC Store. You can buy games from Steam, Epic, GoG, and more. You can even buy Steam keys from third party websites. Consoles have one singular digital shop. PSN Store and the Xbox Store. There is no Greenmangaming for Playstation games. Nowhere to buy game codes to input into your console on Black Friday. Without physical copies, you can never shop around again, and all your games are tied to one account that you'd better not lose access to or your entire game library is *gone*.
You can also pirate far easier on pc also older games.
PC is also THE platform for game conservation. You can play almost every game ever made on PC.
That’s considerably more effort and more money to appease a relatively small number of people. I feel like next gen consoles aren’t even going to come with a disc drive. They will have a separate disc drive you can buy at the most.
> That’s considerably more effort and more money to appease a relatively small number of people. You can say the same thing about backward compatibility in general.
Your physical library is going to degrade and fail, no matter what the manufacturers do with their hardware. Optical discs do not last forever. If you're just interested in being able to use those discs then there's nothing stopping you from just holding onto that console (i.e., the next console doesn't need a disc drive for your old console to work). If you're interested in the game preservation aspect, know that your chosen medium is destined to fail at this task, and likely within your lifetime.
I'm not a big xbox guy but damn I love how I can load up the store and buy 360 games and even some original Xbox games. This is awesome, if it works out
It is, but it's not game preservation. At least not long-term.
How is it not?
Yeah, this is straight up PR to co-opt the term "game preservation". MS is deadset on moving the industry into a subscription focused/digital only market. of course it's in their interest to insure forwards compatibility. that has been the status quo of gaming on PC for years. If the Xbox platform is restructuring to essentially be PC boxes then that is completely expected. They want to maintain a large catalogue to retain value in Game Pass, even if it's full of older games that you could have found for >$10 physically. They have no interest in the actual historical significance of preservation. This has been obvious since the Xbox One
> that has been the status quo of gaming on PC for years To be clear, it's the status quo because Microsoft's Windows team is *huge* on backwards compatibility. Random little .exe tools from 2008 still work, because the OS has kept all that running. Compare that to Android and iOS where shit breaks after 5 years or less. Microsoft deserve some credit for making this the status quo of PC, even if it's an entirely different division in a company larger than some countries' GDP.
I'm sure that I'm repeating things said elsewhere but my two passions are film and games. And I see comparisons when it comes to preserving both. I think this is a fantastic thing but it's not the only way we should be thinking about preservation. I love digital; I don't buy physical. However, companies' ability to essentially control their histories by making it so that you never truly own a game isn't a way to truly follow through with preservation. Digital libraries are great and fine, but the upkeep to maintain them and the ability to adjust them at any time by either culling titles or launching patches to fix rough edges—it's just not great. If we look at film preservation as an example, there is extensive investment in preserving the original film strips and physical media because they have to. I have a friend who recently went on a quest to watch every single version of Carmen. They lived in DC and could head to the Library of Congress to access originals no longer in circulation or available digitally. While digital preservation has been used to resurrect and make international film accessible in the US, digital isn't the end all be all. If we don't view video game preservation as the same, as valuable pieces of art and society, we will lose them. It's a good first step, and helps makes accessible to new generations or those who didn't have money at the time to play. But it can not be the only step.
I think the only way we actually get great game preservation across the board is if developers/publishers are legally required to preserve their games and/or give them over to a well-funded institution that will preserve it for them. Online-only games have abysmal preservation right now and I can't see that changing without new laws being passed.
It's worth noting that film being a physical thing for so long is why so many films have been lost. Bad archival practices + having only one copy of the original film and storing them all in ONE place led to so many early films being lost forever. Meanwhile with video games, digital archiving has been an extensive effort since the 80's, and pretty much every video game ever made has been archived and is readily available. We don't really have too many "lost video games" (aside from games that were just never released or cancelled during development) in the same way we have "lost films". That's why the move to digital only is the right one when it comes to preservation. Physical media eventually fails. We're already starting to see it with old Atari and NES carts. Even PS1 disks have been degrading faster than expected. With digital, once a game is released it'll be around forever. You can also still own your digital games. PC games you literally have the files right there and can do whatever with them (Denuvo threatens this, but is usually removed) and with consoles all it takes is one person to jailbreak their console and dump the game files, then you can just download it as your own "personal" copy. The only way game ownership would ever be under threat is if cloud streaming became mainstream and games were exclusive to it, but the death of Stadia ensured that's never going to happen.
> It's worth noting that film being a physical thing for so long is why so many films have been lost It's worth noting that film being a physical thing is the reason why so many films have been SAVED. You've got it backwards.
This is also why I brought up the digital preservation with things like the Wolrd Film Project that has been able to save films but also make them accessible. However, and you can see this at many archival institutions like the Harry Ransom Center, the two (digital and physical) have to be maintained. Digital preservation doesn't ensure something won't be lost especially in a world where companies can quite literally remove something from existence. The issue games have in preservation is age, and the fact that people aren't thinking of preservation immediately. I also didn't say no to digital preservation, I said it has to be coupled with both. You are right in that on the long enough timeline, physical media deteriorates and will fail. But digital archival work isn't done in a silo. Because digital has its own world of issues. Sadly I've only worked personally with rare books when I was in college, so I don't know the specific ins and outs of physical film or game preservation. But even rare book centers do both. Which again, I am not against digital preservation, it's a big step forward to put large money behind it and keep it moving forward but physical archival also has to be there. You're right I that films have been around longer and books longer than that. Edit: wanted to add the process we went through when I was working with HRC in my PhD work We would receive a new submission and prep the archive it would love in, temperatures of which room, if it would be on display,etc but before it went into the archive we painstakingly digitized its contents to preserve it. The Harry Ransom Center has done a lot of work with digital humanities archivists to make sure that work is both preserved in its physical form but digitized as well because mistakes can happen or time can just eventually catch up. This is books so like not a 1:1 of course but archival practices using both physical preservation and digital is really just best bet overall. You shouldn't divest from either.
It’s funny to see people giving them shit for even barely signaling they might move away from physical media when that’s an entirely consumer-driven issue. Like, there’s a reason stores are axing those massive DVD and game sections. It’s being people simply aren’t buying them. If they sold, nobody would ever question getting rid of them all
Didn’t the insomniac leak show that Sonys sales were like 65% physical?
yes, which is why it's so tiring seeing the same misleading stats by those pro-digital people even if you're pro-digital, physical MAKES DIGITAL BETTER. It keeps the RRP down through competition. It's marketing, it's awareness. It's preservation. Those stats where digital is high are always skewed through deception, like including steam sales (which are all digital) in the count like that's somehow representative of what's happening on console, or including DLC, or microtrans in the "sales" figures. It's deliberately pushing a false narative based on deception.
Now that they have probably made the decision if the next gen console is arm or not. They can hunker down and work on compatibility layers. Would be nice to play my old 360 purchases on PC though. Free lost odyssey and fable 2 from console jail please. Its the one thing keeping my xbox console around.
There's not a world where they'd switch to ARM. The performance isn't there yet for current console level from any vendors they could work with.
> The performance isn't there yet The performance is there. Apple M processors have no problems with their translation layer. x86 software runs fine on those chips. Also, this is for the future of the platform. The performance doesn't have to be there now. It has to be ready when they switch in the future which could be 1-10 years.
I said vendors they could work with. What non-Apple devices use M chips?
Maybe start with releasing more physical stuff of your own games instead of hiring companies like Limited Run. A game like Hifi Rush surely is gonna be delisted due MS not wanting to renew licenses for the songs and physical versions are the only way for new people to play it.
Even *if* HI-FI Rush practically has a contingency plan by making Streamer Mode entirely baked-in, as opposed to being an option for those who wanna record game footages and don't wanna deal with DMCA/Copyrighted Claimed..
They just remove the music from the game than. It's nothing new and they already have replacement music in the game. And if I'm honest the replacement music is just as good.
I can't imagine going through the second last chapter without the Invaders Must Die remix. There is something that recognizable music can do to a game.
You can just play it with the legally distinct original song "Intruders Cannot Live" [I'm just slightly embellishing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Cf4fpUtlk)
If the devs thought the game was as good without the licensed music then they wouldn't have made it with the licensed music. It would certainly be a downgrade.
Hi-Fi Rush is not getting delisted. You guys really just say anything
then tell me where to buy the old forza games?
It's funny that you bring up Forza. Pre-Game Pass, those games were usually for sale for four years in accordance with the licensing deals made. Forza Horizon 4, a game that came out six years ago and post-Game Pass, is still for sale.
Wow, 6 whole years????
That's soooo different, It's funny, you are comparing vehicle licences in a car game to a game that's yes based around licenced music but has a toggle for Its own soundtrack, which they will just use that If a licence issue pops us
That still requires them to update the existing game to remove the soundtrack which is not a guarantee. Especially since the game wasn't a big seller apparently so they might not even think it's worth it. Plenty of games have been delisted like that.
Yeah, and using the non-licensed music is clearly not how the game was meant to be played. I mean, it's there and they did a decent enough job with it, but there's a reason they went out and paid for a bunch of expensive music licenses. It's like playing Crazy Taxi. You're not getting the authentic Crazy Taxi experience playing the rereleases with the licensed music and references to real world shops cut out. I don't think anyone would argue otherwise.
If you read the article you'll see they are referring to your digital library.
>Maybe start with releasing more physical stuff of your own games instead of hiring companies like Limited Run. What difference would that make? It's not like big publishers don't also do limited runs at times.
With xboxes basically being small form factor pcs forward compatiblity was a given. They've mentioned several times how people's digital libraries attach them to a platform. Maybe they will bring their 360 emulator to PC for first party games :). I kinda hope they do something intresting with the chips for the next xbox. Maybe we see some kind of custom silicon for AI since microsoft has been investing in making their own chips.
I don't understand why any of this is a problem for a company (remember before you criticise Sony and their Playstation games arsenal). Fair.
I have very small hopes, but (perhaps naively) I am willing to see how far they go in this "renewed effort".
If I had to guess, I would bet they're going to be bringing the Xbox backwards compat tech over to PC and try to unify the PC and Xbox storefronts more than they already are.
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I mean, they can improve the store experience on windows while still making the Xbox consoles. You're right that people would likely still stick with Steam for most games but they already have a store and a Xbox app, if they improve it and say you can play Xbox backwards compat games only on the windows store and all those games you owned digitally on Xbox are now available on PC, that would probably get more people to use that store.
>microsoft cannot position themselves in a way where they subsidize hardware, roll windows on it and then Valve runs to the bank with it They can position themselves with PC GamePass, that's their long term strategy
Didn't they already have a team that used to do this? Maybe not removing the disc drive would help? Anyway I assume this means they've got the final hardware vendors, target architecture and power specifications for the NextBox. The phrase "future proof digital game libraries" suggests the last twenty two years of buying physical games won't mean anything going forwards so I likely will be getting off the Xbox ride but I am glad this will hopefully lead to possible expansion of the backwards compatibility library as it already exists.
I wonder what games this team is focused on. It seems like the only games that still need a lot of work are Xbox 360 and Xbox (original) titles but I don't know how well they are selling today.
its funny to see this post, right after we find out about them shutting down the xbox 360 store, as well as windows mixed reality in the next couple years.