It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s Xbox division has had an interesting few days. On September 18 a PDF mistakenly attached to one of the documents sent in as part of the ongoing Federal Trade Commission v Microsoft case (concerning Microsoft’s proposed purchase of Activision Blizzard, Inc) placed in the public domain a huge trove of internal messages and documents covering everything from key personnel’s thoughts on the PlayStation 5’s launch to upcoming Xbox product plans. Plans which included a product sheet showing a future disc driveless Xbox Series X console described in language that’s got fans of physical media wondering if Microsoft is not only preparing to give up on discs, but is now actively hostile to the whole idea of physical media.
The ‘offending’ document appeared under the title ‘Brooklin – Xbox Series X Refresh’, and showed a picture of a cylindrical Xbox console design with descriptions of the numerous ways in which this new Series X version (initially set for a November 2024 launch) would improve on the current model. Descriptions which included this line: “The most powerful Xbox ever, now adorably all digital’.
Adorably. Now that really is an interesting word to find on a document that in most respects is sparing and to the point with the rest of its language. Especially since it’s a document intended only for internal circulation at Xbox, and so might be considered more reflective of internal Xbox attitudes than a more public document.
It’s hardly surprising that this wording has raised the hackles of many physical media fans, who see it as a sign that Xbox just can’t wait to do away with pesky disc drives. Is this interpretation reasonable, though? Or is it a case of the increasingly beleaguered physical media fanbase reading things too negatively?
Before focusing specifically on the strange wording used to describe it, let’s consider the basic context for a new Series X console without a disc drive. For starters, whether we physical media lovers like it or not, there is a large – and growing – audience of gamers who only want to download games. They don’t want shelves full of disc boxes, or the inconvenience of having to physically put discs into drives to play a game. For these convenience-based customers, a disc drive is not only unnecessary but potentially actually quite annoying if they feel like they’ve had to pay for one they’re not going to use.
Xbox did cater for this audience, of course (as well as for people who couldn’t afford the Xbox Series X), with the disc drive-free Xbox Series S. So you might wonder why the brand would feel the need to offer an Xbox Series X without a drive as well. But the answer to this is pretty simple, really: The Xbox Series S doesn’t only differ from the Xbox Series X by not carrying a disc drive. It’s also significantly less powerful as a console. So you can absolutely see why Xbox sees mileage in offering the growing fanbase for discless gaming all the power of a full Xbox Series X. Especially as its great rival, PlayStation, sold a discless version of the PS5 alongside the otherwise identically specified disc-carrying version from day one.
Where this simple ‘it’s just Xbox offering another option for a different type of user’ argument falls pretty hard, though, is in the suggestion – statement, really – in Microsoft’s leaked documents to the effect that the upcoming Brooklin Series X would appear as a ‘refresh’ of the current Series X, priced at the same $500 level, rather than it being an addition to the range that might coexist with the current Series X at a slightly cheaper price point.
In fact, another leaked Xbox slide categorically states that the so-called Brooklin Series X will offer upgrades to the functionality of the current Series X, such as double the internal storage and improved Wi-Fi and Bluetooth compatibility, and will mark the End Of Life for the current Series X console (which Xbox refers to in its internal documents as the ‘Starkville’ edition).
Even the wholesale replacement of the disc-carrying Xbox Series X with a discless version would not necessarily mean, though, that Xbox had given up on discs. The Brooklin Xbox Series X’s USB-C port could potentially be used to add an external disc drive if Xbox released one. Something the company has (admittedly now quite distant) history of doing with the HD-DVD drive it released for the Xbox 360. That optional extra didn’t sell particularly well, it has to be said – but then it was something of a different, more niche proposition given that the main Xbox 360 console already had a game and DVD disc drive built in. Essentially the 360’s HD DVD drive let you add a better quality video drive, whereas a potential Brooklin Series X add-on disc drive would be adding physical media support where otherwise there would be none.
It seems to me there are two problems with hoping for an external disc drive for the Brooklin Series X, though. First, the world has changed dramatically in terms of how people access their media since the 360 rolled into town, with a huge surge in streaming and downloading. Second, there’s seemingly nothing in any of the vast quantity of recently leaked documents to suggest that Xbox has any plans at all to launch an external disc drive for Brooklin Xbox Series X. When so much else IS covered in detail in the leaks, this abject absence of information on an external disc drive seems pretty telling.
There is, perhaps, a third reason why an external disc drive for the Brooklin Series X feels unlikely – and it’s the one that physical media fans fear the most. Namely that physical media not only isn’t part of Xbox’s future plans, but actively runs counter to the brand’s future vision.
I’ll get into this possibility in more detail in a moment, but it’s useful first to return to the specific wording of the Brooklin Series X leak. My personal view of which is that the use of the word ‘adorably’ feels quite specifically design-led. Adorable suggests cuteness; something you want to hug or coo over, rather than necessarily something that’s inherently majorly superior in performance terms. So the adorable wording would therefore refer to the way not having to accommodate a disc drive has enabled Xbox designers to come up with a smaller, softer, less angular, less ‘abrasive’ and just more all-round living room-friendly console design.
Admittedly there’s a sense even in this relatively shallow aesthetic reading of ‘adorably’ of a console maker that’s kind of relieved to be free of the ‘ties’, even if they’re just design ones’, associated with accommodating a physical disc drive. But relief in Xbox’s design department doesn’t necessarily translate into a wider ‘we don’t care about physical media anymore’ philosophy.
It’s actually wording further down the introductory paragraph of the Brooklin Series X slide that I, as a physical media fan myself, find more concerning. Specifically the bit that says ‘a beautiful redesign that elevates the all-digital experience of the Xbox ecosystem’.
The first bit about the redesign is just an echo of the ‘adorably’ wording. But the ‘all-digital experience of the Xbox ecosystem’ points pretty aggressively towards a future all-in Xbox equivalence between ‘all digital’ and ‘the Xbox ecosystem’. A future ecosystem, in other words, that’s very much not built around physical media.
The game industry at large and actually Xbox in particular has long been keen on moving to a digital only model. Partly to kill the second hand market, but mostly, in recent times at least, because of the future importance Xbox openly places now on cloud gaming and, especially, the Xbox Game Pass model. Only this week, in fact, Xbox head Phil Spencer declared as part of the official FTC proceedings that Microsoft could actually exit the gaming business if its Game Pass platform doesn’t achieve a high enough level of subscribers by 2026 or 2027. So Xbox’s motivation and drive (pun intended) to move away from physical media for gaming, at least, seems very strong. Even if Spencer may have been exaggerating things a bit in his ‘Microsoft may leave the gaming market’ comments to try and make the Activision purchase case seem more compelling.
Also worth throwing in the mix here when considering the reducing influence physical media is having in the Xbox gaming universe is the way more and more Xbox titles actually only carry a tiny fraction of the full game code on their disc versions, requiring you to download the rest.
While Xbox’s devotion to games on disc really does look seriously in doubt, though, what about movie discs? In this respect Xbox has a pretty decent history. As well as going to the trouble of making the external HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360, it scored major points with home cinema fans when it supported 4K Blu-ray disc playback in the Xbox One console when the PlayStation 4 did not. And this support has continued, of course, with the current Xbox Series X.
However… most AV fans would acknowledge that the 4K Blu-ray drives in both the Xbox One and Series X haven’t performed particularly well compared with standalone 4K Blu-ray decks (as confirmed in my own review of the Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray drive). As a result, the current Series X 4K BD drive is almost certainly used less by AV fans for movies than it would be if it delivered better results. Couple this with a) the way the epic rise in movie and TV streaming in recent years has led to a hefty and ongoing reduction in movie disc sales and b) an actual anti-disc motive in the shape of Xbox’s all-important Gamepass system, and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Xbox no longer being so troubled by the backlash it might have suffered in years gone by if it turns out there really is no physical media solution/option for the Brooklin Series X edition.
So are there any other grounds for hope, beyond the faint ones already discussed, that the leaked Brooklin Series X plans aren’t the work of a brand hell bent on giving up on physical media? Maybe.
Perhaps the main one is that Phil Spencer has been at pains to stress that many of the plans discussed in the leaked documents have already been changed. So physical media optimists can hope that some disc-based love might be part of these changing plans. Honestly, though, I’d be surprised if the Brooklin Series X’s seemingly quite settled design would be changed as dramatically as it would need to be to accommodate a disc drive at this point – never mind Xbox having to deliver such a major philosophical u-turn on the all-digital tone of its current internal messaging.
There was, promisingly, some evidence to suggest that the disc-carrying PS5 sold considerably more than the discless version when Sony’s most recent console came out, perhaps pointing to the strength of ongoing demand for disc support in new hardware. That PS5 launch situation could have been skewed, though, by Sony’s early production problems and the varying availability of the two new PS5 versions. Plus, according to Xbox’s own recently released internal documents, 75% of people who have bought a Series S or X since launch have gone for the cheaper, all-digital S model. Ouch.
On top of all this, according to gameindustry.biz, more than 94% of video game revenue in 2022 was achieved through digital rather than physical sales. So even if there was a demand for disc drives in 2020, that either massively collapsed in the two years after the Xbox Series X and PS5 came out, or else the demand for disc drives in consoles was actually driven mostly by a desire for consoles to double up as Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray movie disc players.
Which brings me to arguably the best grounds for hope that physical media support might still play a part in Xbox’s future: The nascent signs of a renewed interest in physical media we’re starting to see from both consumers and content creators and film studios. A renewed interest Xbox might see a benefit in capturing.
Disney, in particular, has suddenly started to take 4K Blu-ray and Blu-ray seriously again after years of neglect. Also, numerous boutique-style publishers have started to release often gorgeously packaged and lovingly restored classic films on 4K Blu-ray just when I’d begun to think it was starting to feel lucky if even big box office modern releases got the physical media treatment. Finally, while there remain exceptions, there seems to a slowly growing acknowledgment by some studios that focusing almost exclusively on streaming for the past year or two has been something of a fool’s errand, and that there really is still gold to be found in them there physical media hills.
Even with recent signs of renewed interest from both sides of the premium physical media movie market, though, it’s impossible to deny that the overall physical media market for movies continues to shrink year on year. It might still have the potential to be a lucrative niche, but it’s a niche nonetheless. And a niche, moreover, where potential profits are easier to make on the software side than they are on the hardware side.
In the end, much as I would love as a fan of physical media myself to picture disc drives still featuring large in Xbox’s future thinking despite the complete absence of them in the company’s recently leaked documents, the omens really don’t seem promising.
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Related reading
Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray Player Review: A Work In Progress. Hopefully
PS5 Vs Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray Player Showdown
Disney Drops Another Great 4K Blu-ray Surprise With Plush Releases Of Major Star Wars And Marvel Shows
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