Xbox will be letting players digitize their library of physical games soon as it launches their new Disc-to-Digital program during this year’s Gamescom, and it’ll be rolled out to Xbox Insiders from August 31 before being available for all players in the near future. This 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.
This effectively means that if you only have a particular game on your Xbox Series X or Series S console, you will be able to play it on PC, the ROG Ally, or even your mobile devices.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote the following on X/Twitter regarding the new feature: “Your physical game library is more than a collection of discs. It holds years of memories and stories worth preserving. Starting next week, XBOX Insiders can unlock a digital entitlement for supported physical games. We’ll start with thousands of titles and add more as we can.”
There’s also some speculation that the purpose of this 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.
