After leaking last month, Xbox has officially confirmed a program to let users turn physical games into digital licenses.

Players have spent decades building their XBOX libraries. Some games were purchased on disc. Some were purchased digitally. Many span multiple generations of hardware.

Our goal is to make it easier for those libraries to move forward with players.

If only another company felt this way...

"Most XBOX One and XBOX Series X disc-based games support this new feature. Players can claim a digital entitlement by inserting a supported disc into an XBOX One or XBOX Series X console and launching the game. Once the entitlement is claimed, you can experience the benefits of digital, including XBOX Play Anywhere and XBOX Cloud Gaming where supported, while your physical disc continues to work exactly as it always has."

This reminds me of buying a physical movie anytime in the last 15 years. Most Blu-Ray/4K movies bundle a digital code for the movie and even the lesser format.1 Letting us play a digital version of the physical game makes sense and is very in line with the "play anywhere" approach Xbox has devised over the last two generations.

This system Xbox has cooked up seems to depend on some sort of unique identifier tied to each individual disc. From the leak last month, Tom Warren at The Verge said:

"This digital entitlement is tied to the specific disc, and it will move from account to account if you swap the physical game with a friend or log in to a different Xbox profile and try to play a disc-based game."

This is presumably to prevent me from borrowing a buddy's game, getting the digital license, and then giving the game back, but keeping the digital copy. Same with grabbing a used game and returning it to the store. Somehow, the license is tied to the disc, essentially tying that disc to your Xbox account.

But don't be fooled, Microsoft can revoke said license at anytime. Here's the tiny fine print only found in the header image of the article:

Requires supported console with disc drive, and eligible XBOX One or Series X game disc. One revokable digital license per game disc. License eligibility varies and is subject to change. Disc remains playable. Terms and usage rules apply. Gears 5 sold separately (in-game purchases).

I am quite pleased with this news. It's an easy win for Xbox in light of all the physical games news from PlayStation. I wish they'd do something similar. It feels like a smack in the face to all the folks that bought a PS5 with a disc drive and bought physical games with the notion that those will not be playable on future hardware. They are breaking backward compatibility with some of their most dedicated players.

We'll see how it all shakes out for Xbox. I may try to figure out how to get in that there Insider program. I think this might be the way for me to finally get access to GoldenEye 007 with my physical copy of Rare Replay. Still absolutely ridiculous that physical owners don't get that add-on.

Footnotes

  1. There was a time when you could get the 4K, 1080p Blu-Ray, DVD, and a digital code! This is why it always made sense to me to buy the 4K copies of films, even when I didn't have a 4K Blu-Ray player. ↩