With both video games and films proving more popular digitally, disc drive assembly lines are shutting down and giving Sony and Microsoft further incentive to go all-digital.
While some will see Microsoft’s new disc-to-digital scheme, where you can convert your physical games into digital ones, as a win over Sony, it also feels like a quiet acknowledgement that Xbox will be following PlayStation’s example and ditch physical games altogether.
Backlash to the prospect of an all-digital future on PlayStation remains persistent online, but the unfortunate truth is that sales of physical games have been declining for years as more and more customers opt to buy their games digitally.
This has also had a knock-on effect on disc drives themselves as a new report says those are at risk of dying out too.
According to Windows Central’s Jez Corden, he has heard from his own sources that the ‘entire supply chain’ for disc drive components ‘is collapsing’ since assembly lines are moving away from them.
This makes sense since it’s not only video games that more people engage with digitally nowadays, with movies and TV shows available via streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime or through digital purchases.
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Some movies and shows don’t even have physical releases, specifically to ensure people watch them by signing up to whatever streaming services they’re on, so it should be no surprise that physical media has become less popular across the board.
The writing’s been on the wall for some time, considering most laptops stopped having built-in disc drives years ago, requiring you to buy them separately.
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Xbox has purposefully avoided saying whether Project Helix will feature a disc drive or not but considering disc drives are becoming harder to make and not including one would save manufacturing costs, it stands to reason that the console will be digital-only.
With the initial version of the Xbox One, Microsoft tried to move towards all-digital long before Sony, but they’ve been sensible enough to take advantage of their rival’s bad publicity as much as possible. Xbox boss Asha Sharma recently told the BBC, ‘I know players love physical media, and I know there’s a lot of benefits in digital media, and I want to make sure people have a choice.’
This is no doubt why they’re offering a disc-to-digital scheme in the first place, to ensure fans can still access their physical collection on the new console, scoring Microsoft and Xbox some easy PR points after another notorious wave of layoffs.
The same can’t be said for PlayStation fans, since even if the PlayStation 6 is backwards compatible, it’s all but guaranteed to lack a disc drive and Sony’s yet to offer a similar disc-to-digital service.
It’s been suggested that Sony could sell a separate disc drive add-on, but the reported supply chain collapse for disc drives means Sony will either not bother or any such add-on would be very expensive.
Since the PlayStation 6 is expected to be extremely costly on its own, it’s hard to imagine many people investing in both, for the sole purpose of playing their old PlayStation games on newer hardware.
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