It will be very curious to see where this practice goes down the road. All we can is remain hopeful. How are you feeling about it?

I mean, with Helix around the corner, is this suggesting it's going to have a disc drive? Because otherwise this is just "We're going digital, please don't get mad at us like you did at Sony".

16:00 this isnt the case. Went you put a disc into your console your copy the download to your console so whether its physcial game or digital it will still take up storage space regardless. So lets say you install gears of war 5 from the disc without the internet it will be the same size as the base 1.0 digital game

I feel like this is the next best thing to true physical gaming.

You still get a physical disc, that you can resell or loan. And you get the box and the art that you can display on the shelf and just enjoy collecting. This still wont be enough for some people and I think that's fair.

BUT if Helix does have a disc drive and allows this system to continue on with new games, not just backwards compatible with your old library, I would say this is a nice compromise, or at least the lesser of two evils.

Here's my take: if they had this in the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era, we would have saved a lot more discs than we have now. We needed it 2 decades ago

It's great now that they reward physical with a digital copy of our game like movies do. Makes it worth the $70 purchase. But all they have to do is have that digital copy locked behind the GamePass. Now you have to pay a subscription fee in order to play your digital game on any other system that has the Xbox cloud.

I think one thing missed is the fact that enabling putting your physical data on storage can provide better load times while playing the game. Read/write speeds are slower from disc/cartidge than from internal storage on the hardware. So you get benefits from owning a physical copy while getting the benefits from having game stores internally. I hope Nintendo also enables this through their virtual game card system.

I guess this doesn't necessarily mean xbox will continue to produce disks, but I can't imagine they'd put all this time and money into this feature only to not give the next xbox a disc drive. At least that's what I'm hoping.

Neither.
But it is just digital games in disguise.

i want discs to die for cartridges to rise!
Cartridges don't take up storage, the game plays off the cartridge, no install waiting, zero internet / download requirement - take the game out of the case, put it into the console, and it just works and immediately works! This is the future for gaming, especially since the potential that cartridge offer for prolonging a console life to be much longer (SNES tried this, but it was way to early at the time).

But also cartridges for movies/shows/anime and music too - this stuff can be made to be much slower to be cheaper to produce, and for shows/anime, an entire season and/or series can fit on a single cartridge - no more multi-disc setups for physical entertainment!


Music be sick because you would have zero internet reliance, brings back physical media for music so we can browse music in real stores again, and unlike the disc walkman - cartridges cannot skip and cartridges can be made to fit the size of MP3 players so we can retain the small size for the pocket and have the benefits of true physical media for music!

The future is physical media.

Especially since consoles have to innovate to create brand new gaming experiences, which means gaming needs to embrace its toy side like what the Wii and DS brought to the table.
A part of the innovation is some games will need to include a physical thing to play it so might as well have the game run off a cartridge too since you need to go to a real store to get the game since it is 100% physical only.

This is the real future for gaming, not the forced propaganda future that Sony is trying to artificially force on everyone...

Mr. Iwata also saw this as the future of gaming as well.
Keep in mind, the Wii and DS generation was the same generation, Nintendo was approaching 300 million consoles sold in a single generation!

I share some of your sentiments, Rob.
There was a moment I felt inconvenienced by the need to get up off my couch and physically change the game cartridge....and then I had this realization of how incredible my life was that I could live in a futuristic age of playing video games in the comfort of my own home, and I henceforth decided that I don't need video games to be any more convenient, and I shouldn't be any lazier.

At some point we have to stop trying to chase more and more "convenience" and accept that our lives are already incredibly convenient. Like what's next? Have games downloaded directly into our brains for convenience? Even Star Trek depicts data on physical storage devices, and that seems futuristic enough for me.

Something tells me they won't have an optical drive on the unit but will have an option for a drive accessory. In a perfect world, they would allow you to use any external drive that could read the discs correctly.

My response to physical media, when it comes to gaming, This situation isn't as simple, as people are making things out to be/there are A LOT of factors that go into this, and a lot paths people COULD go down, SOME MAY buy an AYONEO/Steam Deck/buy/build a PC, AND use GOG/DRM-free stores/options and SOME MIGHT even make their OWN physical media, OR AT THE LEAST, make start up media, with cover art/boxes, for display, and have a personal NAS/Server, OR they MAY just pirate games, due to how hard it is to buy SOME games, or not being able to buy the game at all, and only being able to rent, some of them, which honestly makes A LOT more sense, when you factor in, other factors that A LOT of people leave out, such as, the Blu-Ray Disc Drive Speed/A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray drive transfers data between 27 and 44 Megabytes per second/MBs.

The PS5 Pro's SSD Speed/the custom NVMe SSD inside the PS5 pro reads data at 5,500 Megabytes per second/5.5 GBs a second.

So once the install FINALLY finishes, the disc drive shuts off completely, and when you play a game, the disc spins for 5 seconds, to verify you legally own the game, then the drive shuts off, but we STILL don't want companies to take away physical media, even if its EXTREMELY slow, compared to downloading the game at 1,000MB down, and using the NVME SSD, which is crazy fast, ALSO another factor is disc size/the 100GB limit, and often requiring 3 discs to store, SOME of the game; Also Sony being able to put what ever price they want on games, in their digital store, and no other competition/there being no other options/places to purchase the game, would also be bad, even if technically you STILL have to download a MASSIVE chunk of the game, from Sony's servers, and that data, not being there, when you put the disc into your system, years from now, to get the ENTIRETY of the game, AND even IF TECHNICALLY owning physical media, ALSO means you don't TRUELY own the game, granted companies arent going to come in your house, and physically take it from you, so thats why physical media is STILL important, even if physical media doesn't make sense, from a performance aspect/Even if a developer ACTUALLY puts the entire uncompressed game, on a Blu-ray disc, running it directly from the disc drive would slow the console down and cause MASSIVE performance issues while running the game/the game would freeze/crash/not be able to run from the disc drive, because its ENTIRELY TO SLOW, it is funny time wise, the difference between using the disc, and downloading the game/ it CAN take, a 30GBs game, 1HR, from the disc, OR like 15 seconds when you just download it, and if you were to bring a 5200RPM external hardrive, that you used on your PS4, it COULD TAKE even longer, AND PS5 games COULD/PROBABLY would have MASSIVE problems, IF the game was ran from that slow drive.

Granted, I don't think they want to sell you the game, AT ALL, digitally OR physically/why would they, I think its about control/It MUST be about subscriptions, which I wont be a part of either/look at the state of God Of War 1 & 2, there is a PS3 copy, that wont play on a PS4 OR PS5; Look at Mario 2 & 3, they aren't available physically, OR digitally, on Switch 1 OR Switch 2, they are talking about a Zelda 64 ;  & Star Fox 64, JUST released, you have to also keep in mind, that Nintendo, is living in Sony's/Playstation's past, right now/Nintendo has ALWAYS been behind technologically, Nintendo just didn't have any competition, FOR A WHILE, like a Vita 2, Steam Deck, Rog Ally, Ayaneo and so on, when it comes to bluray movies thats technically fine/there is no slowdown aspect, that matters, like it does with gaming, I STILL want physical media though, we NEED a faster disc, and a disc that can hold 500GBs AND 1TBs, because that is going to be NEEDED, for physical media to stay alive/you can't even use a hardrive, on a modern system, because its to slow, and the disc is even slower.

I won't be doing this. I am also being sceptical too because who is to say that a year from now they change the terms and now that disk is worthless because they now say that it is a permanent transfer and your disk is worthless further going down the road of pulling licenses upon expiration and now you no longer have that game.

I mean if they can do this, then they should also be able to allow people to burn the digital license key onto their own discs. Still works exactly the same way, but you are then able to sell that game or let someone borrow it. It would work the same way. That will make it feel more like you own your digital purchases.

I think they're trying to fool us and screw us in the end.  Such is life.  I guess. You said it.  They're just trying to lighten the boom.  ❤

The most convenient way for games and other media is cartridge base.

They just kept slowly making physical worse and and worse and/or not give the option at all, instead of moving to the superior cartridge format!
No installs, no downloads, no internet requirement, no additional storage requirement - everything on the cartridge and plays off the cartridge.

What's ironic is the serial number was created for the DRM they wanted to impose on us with the Xbone that backfired.

Hey man. Good video. 2 things. Do you think that Xbox is holding out on their disc decision so that Sony doesn’t copy them and change their mind while they have time? Maybe it’s a timing strategy?
Also do you think it’s better to come out with a disc drive attachment instead of with the system? That way we can replace them a lot easier than buying a whole new console like I had to when the ps5 phat disc drive failed.

Basically gives you whatever is available digitally. So if it's Play Anywhere title, you can now play PC and Cloud with saves syncing, etc.

I have hundreds of Xbox, 360 and One games.
Of course this is a welcomed option.

I just hope there are plenty of compatible games.