Is the disc-less Xbox the death knell for physical media

Microsoft recently refreshed the Xbox Series X, and while it comes with multiple improvements to power usage, one thing has been taken away. The new base model Robot White Xbox Series X with 1TB storage is all-digital, so the Blu-ray drive has been removed. Sure, it’s $50 lower in price for that, but it’s a worrying trend when access to physical media is shrinking fast. To get an optical drive on the Xbox now, you have to pony up for the 2TB version, which costs $600, or buy the older and more power-hungry model while it’s still available. With optical drives disappearing on laptops, and PC gaming handhelds all being digital only, it really looks like the end of the road for physical media.

Optical drives are already gone from the PC market

The consoles are just catching up

While you might have anecdotal evidence that gamers prefer their games to be on physical media, the hard sales figures paint a very different story. The Year in Numbers datasheet from GamesIndustry.biz for 2023 shows that, overwhelmingly, gamers on all platforms spend their money on digital versions before any other. The worldwide gaming revenue figures show that 95% of global gaming revenue, $174.5 billion dollars, came from digital game purchases. That’s spread out among storefronts like Steam, Xbox Store, PlayStation Store, and Nintendo eShop, as well as mobile storefronts, in-game purchases, and microtransactions.

On PC, only one percent of all game sales were physical copies, which is perhaps unsurprising. Modern PC cases don’t often come with space for a 5.25″ optical drive, and there are only a few laptops on the market with optical drives. Add in the fact that it’s hard enough or near-impossible to play Blu-ray discs on PC thanks to licensing issues, and the death of physical media on PC is almost gone, or certainly relegated to retro PC builds that run old operating systems to play the games of yesteryear without emulation.

Even in the console market, where gamers like buying physical discs because of the thriving second-hand market, only 17% of all sales in 2023 happened in this way. Xbox and PlayStation have offered digital-only consoles alongside the disc-based versions for some time now, but interestingly, data from data analyst firm Circana shows that 51% of all Xbox Series sales were for the Xbox Series X which came with a disc drive, and 82% of PlayStation 5 sales were for the disc-based unit. That’s changing currently though, with September 2024 spending on PS5’s showing 40% were digital-only units.

There’s probably some missing data for context here, like pandemic-era supply chains and if the disc-based version of these consoles were more readily available. Also, for the Xbox Series, at least, the lesser-powered specifications of the Xbox Series S put off some buyers. The overall trend towards digital-only consoles, PCs, and handhelds is clear, though, even without those numbers. The only gaming handhelds with physical media come from Nintendo, who have a long history of cartridge-based games.

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We already don’t own most of our content

From games to movies, digital content is now license-to-use

Unless you’ve got a collection of physical media that started years ago, or have your own digital media server filled with copies of your collection, or have a console that uses cartridges for its games, the sad fact is that you don’t really own any of the digital content you purchased. What you do own is a license to use that content, for as long as the digital rights holder (which isn’t you) allows. The very thing that gives us near-uncountable reams of movies, TV shows, and games within a few seconds of looking is also one of the most annoying features of our modern age and something that we can’t really do anything about.

When games companies knew you had a fairly good chance of having an optical drive on your PC, and the average internet speed was substantially lower, they had more incentive to release physical games. As internet speeds crept up and PC cases made it more difficult to install optical drives, that equation changed, to the point where if you buy a ‘physical’ PC game in a store, you’re more likely to get a piece of paper inside with a code to enter into Steam, or one of the other online storefronts.

There’s no incentive for the game studio to provide physical games unless you’re on a console, and even then, the incentive is dwindling. Microsoft does a fairly good job of allowing disc-based games from previous console generations to be used on the current consoles, but even then, it’s from a list of titles that have been made back-compatible. If you have a physical game from years ago, you might not be able to play it, so it’s not much different from a digital license in that respect.

Currently, if titles are removed from a digital storefront, they’re still usually available to download if you already own them. They’re just removed from future sales, often because of music licensing issues or other unresolvable situations. The thorny question of what happens to your purchases when a digital service closes could be catastrophic, as not every company has the funds to refund all sales, like what happened with Google Stadia’s closing. Digital ownership isn’t going away, and rights holders aren’t going to let us download copies that can’t be revoked, so the whole thing is a bit of a mess. There’s not even a good option to resolve it, not one that takes into account the many stakeholders in the equation.

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Physical media for games and content are on the way out

Whether you prefer physical media or not, the fact is the sales of the medium are dwindling. Nor are they a perfect solution to digital rights management, as disc-based media get scratched or faded over time, which means they already have an expiration date of sorts. Cartridge-based games fare better in this respect, but they’re limited in scope as you can only put so much storage into them before they become uneconomical to produce. PC gamers have gotten used to buying their games digitally, and it seems console gamers are going to have to adjust as well. The only difference here is that you can find ways to play older PC titles, while for consoles, you’re at the whims of the manufacturer. Oh, and mobile gamers? They’re already there, having grown up with no other choice.