Microsoft is said to have decided to switch game sales entirely to digital in the future. According to several industry insiders
Are the days of Xbox games on disc soon to be over? According to industry insiders, they could soon go the same way as PC games a few years ago and only be available digitally.
European retailers are reportedly gradually reducing their range, and Microsoft is said to have closed departments responsible for disc versions. This is reported by Christopher Dring from GamesIndustry.biz, among others, citing an anonymous major publisher.
Xbox is a “very digital console “
In the podcast microcast (here on YouTube) Ding says:
Just before Christmas, I learned from a major publisher that several retailers in Europe have started to delist the Xbox. The Xbox is such a digital console, the physical sales of the games are really low, and when you’re selling a console that most people only download games for, the [disc business] doesn’t really do much for the retailer.
According to journalist and industry expert Jez Corden, Microsoft is also responding to this with a restructuring. He writes on X (formerly Twitter) that Microsoft has closed departments responsible for the physical games market as part of the major wave of redundancies.
Multiple sources tell me that Microsoft is laying off the entire internal customer support team(s) for ABK games, save a few.
MS will outsource the rest to external companies abroad.
ABK was one of the few games pubs with a high-quality internal customer support team.
– Jez (@JezCorden) January 25, 2024
And there’s another leak that could underline the imminent end of Xbox games on disc: Microsoft is reportedly planning a small Xbox Series X for November 2024, which has no disk drive and can only be used for digital games. Its code name is “Brooklyn” and it should otherwise have the same specs as the standard Xbox X.
Several big games have been released or will be released soon without a physical release, such as Alan Wake 2 and the upcoming Xbox-exclusive Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.
What do you think about the trend towards digital-only games? Does it worry you because you only buy licenses and no longer buy discs? Is the issue of resale important to you? Or have you switched to digital without any problems and no longer buy games in stores anyway? We’d love to hear your opinion in the comments!
