The Xbox Disc-to-Digital feature is now live for all Xbox gamers, roughly a month after it entered into public testing with Xbox Insiders.
The feature allows you to pop in an Xbox One or Xbox Series X disc and activate a digital license on your account that means you no longer need the disc to be inserted in order to play. Effectively, it makes the disc into a transferrable activation key.
The caveats are that not all Xbox One or Series X game discs are eligible, and they require publisher approval for this to work – over the past month, more publishers have come on board, with Square Enix and Sega recently adding their libraries. Some older discs might also be incompatible, not having the unique identifier that allows this feature to work. Also, it’s not a permanent license, and if you sell the disc or allow a friend to activate using a disc, it will be removed from your account.
The Xbox support page has a bunch of questions and answers to aid in the process. For example, there’s advice on how to add game in bulk – you can turn off the auto-play which triggers game installation – and confirmation that Xbox Play Anywhere titles can also grant access to the PC version of a game through this.
This is a real boon going through the tail end of this generation, especially with the spectre of PlayStation’s decision to kill of physical media production in 2028. It’s not clear whether Xbox will feature a disc drive next generation, but disc-to-digital does at least mean that physical collections won’t be left behind for those that do still like to dabble with a bit of backward compatibility and older games. Even in the current generation, this means that you could dust off an old Xbox One, use it to load up a game collection, and then access and play on digital-only Xbox Series S consoles.
Source: Xbox
