During this year’s Gamescom, Xbox announced it’s Disc-to-Digital program which will let players digitize their entire library of physical games and it was rolled out to all Xbox Insiders from August 31, and is set to arrive for all players in the near future. The new feature allows players in the platform to put their Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S discs into their console and receive a digital version of their owned games, ensuring a permanent library of digital titles.
The original discs will remain playable of course, however, if your give the game to someone else and they insert that copy into their console, it’ll result in you losing access to your digital license, so yes, there’s a bit of a catch there. But aside from that, having a digitized library of all your games can be highly convenient, not only cause of the limited shelf-life of physical media, but as it also allows you to stream those games through the cloud or access them on your other owned devices through Xbox Play Anywhere, if the games support those features.
However, it’s been recently known that both Ubisoft and Squire Enix aren’t participating in the program as players have discovered that inserting a disc for any Ubisoft title into an Xbox console has been met with a message stating ‘Digital license unavailable,’ while also adding that ‘this game is not participating in digital licensing’.
The exact same phenomena has also been observed from games published by Squire Enix as the company may have also made the decision to opt-out from Xbox’ digital licensing feature. Also, some rumors have surfaced which indicate several other big-name publishers may also follow suit, although neither Ubisoft nor Squire Enix has commented officially regarding their stance on the disc-to-digital program and whether some of their titles will be supported in the near future.
There’s also been speculation that the purpose of this digitization feature is to smooth the transition between the current-gen Xbox systems and the next generation Xbox or the Project Helix, which could turn out to be a digital-only platform.
