Xbox Goes Disc-Free

MICROSOFT’S NEW Xbox One S All-Digital Edition has something missing: a disc drive. Other than that, it’s an Xbox One S. The $249 box comes with Minecraft, Forza Horizon3, and SeaofThieves pre-installed, but pretty much obliges you to pay full price for digital downloads (no more borrowing or buying used). An Xbox Games Pass at $9.99 a month will get you a decent library of games, and you’ll need another 10 bucks for an Xbox Live Gold subscription for the full multiplayer experience. The Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is due later this year at $14.99 a month, which includes both.

Going disc-free isn’t a surprise—digital sales are now over 80 percent of all games sales. There isn’t the money in making the console hardware either; getting people on a subscription is where the real payoff is. Microsoft is also working on a pure game streaming service, akin to Google’s Stadia: project xCloud.

Meanwhile, we await the next generation of consoles, the Xbox Two and PlayStation 5, or whatever they’re called when they arrive next year. Microsoft plans two new boxes, one a traditional console, the other designed to stream games, with some processing done locally, but the bulk of the game running on a cloud server.

Sony’s new machine gets a custom set of silicon from AMD based around a Zen 2 Ryzen chip, coupled to a Navi GPU, which will support ray tracing. There’s also a bespoke SSD system, which means minimal loading times. It all sounds good so far.

This pair will probably be the last generation of “traditional” consoles, where you can buy a hard copy of a game and actually own it. We should know a lot more about both after this year’s E3 show. It’s gearing up to be another head-on fight.