Phil Spencer has a wide ranging interview with Stephen Totillo of GameFile.news. One of the topics brought up is how Xbox isn’t trying to push customers to all-digital. Recent reports about Xbox laying off it’s physical software team had fans worried that the end of physical disc-based games may be near for Xbox.
“We are supportive of physical media, but we don’t have a need to drive that disproportionate to customer demand,” he told me.
“We ship games physically and digitally, and we’re really just following what the customers are doing. And I think our job in running Xbox is to deliver on the things that a majority of the customers want. And right now, a majority of our customers are buying games digitally.”
“But I will say our strategy does not hinge on people moving all-digital,” he said. “And getting rid of physical, that’s not a strategic thing for us.”
Phil Spencer to GameFile
During Xbox’s FTC court case, a disc-less update for the Xbox Series X was accidentally revealed inside a corporate PDF file.
The digital Series X refresh was known internally as Codename Brooklin. Potential new technology included:
- New, more modern IO through a new southbridge motherboard chip
- Wi-Fi 6E radio for better throughput, latency, and interference mitigation
- Bluetooth 5.2 radio for improved accessory experiences
- 6 nanometer die shrink for improved efficiency
- USB-C front port with power delivery
- 2TB of default storage space
- Reduced Power Supply usage by 15%
- New low-power standby mode which uses 20% of the current system’s version
- 100% recyclable packaing
For the full quotes please visit GameFile for the interview which covers subjects such as ABK titles being confirmed for Day One on Xbox.
Please comment below on how you feel about our possible digital-only future. Do you feel reassured by Mr. Spencer’s quotes above?
That’s good. Hoping the next generation Xbox console has an internal disc drive as opposed to the optional external disc drive that Sony is doing with the current PlayStation 5 model.
Unfortunately, I think they’ll likely go with external for a lot of the same reasons as the PS did.
it’s a way to pass along the costs to those that want it. Phil kind of mentioned that there aren’t as many companies buying / selling the drives as there used to be as most other consumer products don’t have them, which implies that they cost more than they used to also.
Phil said the majority of users don’t use it - so again, cuts costs in design. I remember him mentioning the removal of the TOSLINK for Series consoles being something that maybe cut costs on the console by $5 or so per unit, but then saying it’s a several hundred-million-dollar decision to do that when you look at the life of the console. Say their costs are $20 / device, and they sell 10 million of a discless model, that cuts $200 million in costs, not including being able to have smaller boxes which makes storage & shipping cheaper.
It’s an extra component of a largish size to try to fit into the design & have cooling for, where if you do it external, you can find a few other options for how it fits into your design language, doesn’t really need the cooling because the heat is more self-contained.
Making it an optional extra means that people may be more likely to consider digital, since they’d have to buy a drive as well if they want a disc. Digital is typically more profitable.
I personally am one that does prefer to have a drive - and in general would love to have it inside as well, but I think it’s unlikely that they’ll go that route since Sony has already made it easy for them to introduce it as an option.
Fully external drive could be forward-compatible.
I believe Blu-ray licensing costs are an added cost as well.
The OG Xbox required us to buy a remote control to play DVDs, and the cost of that paid for the license.
I personally like the add-on option because it can reduce the cost of the console.
All this said, the biggest issue with Xbox games on discs is the fact that many of them don’t have the game on the disc. These aren’t experiences you can play offline entirely. Owning the disc honestly doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Despite PlayStation’s move to external drives, I see a commitment to physical because their games, as well as all 3rd party titles, include a playable copy of the game without any connection.
Yeah, I was keeping it simple, but I know the Blu ray licensing is one of the reasons why even on the Xbox One they didn’t install the app to play movies right away because they didn’t want to eat the cost of the license to play the disc unless you actually were going to use it.
I didn’t know the license was built into the remote cost on the original, that’s interesting
Yeah - that had occurred to me also, it would be nice if that’s the case
Yeah, sadly I think that you’ll end up being right. Of course, if they have an optional disc drive available for sale, while better than nothing, I just see that as being even more greedy than Microsoft already is. UGH.
Hopefully, the disc drive is internal for at least one more console generation.
They could add more RAM, storage, a better GPU or other improvements for the same bill of material without spending on an optical drive. While I see how it could come off greedy, no point in the majority of the market paying more for a niche capability.
They might not have but their customers have already decided what they want, a separate external disc drive seems like the way to go going forward
At least that way they’ll still have the option, that being said, with the likely handheld on the way and the direction of the industry, physical isn’t long for this world
Yeah, all true. But I don’t see any of those other things costing the same as an optical disc drive which is what $15 bucks? None of that other stuff is costing only $15 bucks. lol
I think the drive would be closer to $30, and probably not reducing in cost (maybe increasing) since the market is getting smaller.
I think you’d be surprised at how things add up. For example, I’ve seen tear downs that had the APU for some consoles in the 80-100 range. They could have a larger processor with that extra $30.
That said, they’d probably release the same thing but take less loss lol.