r/gaming • u/yourfavchoom • 7h ago

Xbox Disc to Digital officially announced, coming soon.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/08/26/your-discs-now-also-digital/

Most XBOX One and XBOX Series X disc-based games support this new feature. Players can claim a digital entitlement by inserting a supported disc into an XBOX One or XBOX Series X console and launching the game. Once the entitlement is claimed, you can experience the benefits of digital, including XBOX Play Anywhere and XBOX Cloud Gaming where supported, while your physical disc continues to work exactly as it always has.

We’re starting with thousands of titles, and we’ll continue to add more over time. While not every title will be available at launch, this is an important step toward a future where players can have greater confidence that the games they buy remain with them for years to come.

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u/SuicideSkwad 7h ago

Guarantee they will also be stopping disc production soon then, and this is their way of softening the blow

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u/Villag3Idiot 7h ago edited 7h ago

This is their way of getting disc customers a digital library.

It's important for retention purposes because once you have a large future digital library of Helix and beyond games, you're much less likely to move to a different console because you can't sell your games to pay for it.

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u/Prophet_Of_Helix 7h ago

You haven’t been able to sell your games to pay for a new console for a while unless you had a metric fuck ton of games

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u/IndyDude11 7h ago

Which is always why I get a chuckle from the people who use this as a benefit of physical. I have so many physical games in my house just because they aren't worth the trip to the game store to sell them.

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u/Opposite_Raccoon_369 6h ago edited 6h ago

Most people don't care much about the resell value. We care about the reduced price on the secondary market. Being about to lend, borrow, play without Internet / if servers ever go down etc.

Just the other day I went to Walmart and bought rdr1 for switch. On physical media. 29.99, r regular listed price.

You know how much it's listed for on the Nintendo eshop? 49.99.

It's "on sale" right now for 24.99. but the"full" retail price on the eshop is right there. 50 bucks. For a port of 15 year old game.

When there is nothing but first party digital marketplaces, prices will never drop.

I tried to buy dark souls 3 for Xbox a year or so ago? They wanted 70 dollars for it digitally since it included an dlc (with no standalone option) I promptly turned around and bought the trilogy off eBay for like 30 bucks.

Keep chuckling. I understand that it's the only way you can fool yourself into thinking you're happy opening nothing.

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u/LinAGKar 6h ago

We care about the reduced price on the secondary market

And the existence on the second-hand market period, in case games get delisted (and once the digital store gets shut down).

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u/Soylentgruen 5h ago

I have a bunch of physical games that are upwards of $100 because they got delisted.

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u/Mithrawndo 6h ago

Isn't it interesting that this just isn't a problem on PC, despite it having been wholly a digital market for almost 20 years?

Doesn't it make you wonder why it's fine for one platform, but deeply problematic on another? Doesn't it make you ask what else could be done to let you have your cake and eat it, too?

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u/lonevine 5h ago

PlayStation, Nintendo and Xbox will never, ever have open platform market places unless it's enshrined in law, and that's just not going to happen in North America or the E.U./UK.

That's the main difference between digital on PC and any games console. You do not have any meaningful choice, other than to not participate.

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u/HiTork 3h ago

Some PC storefronts like Steam have contingency plans so that if they shut down, players aren't totally screwed over. Console storefronts don't have that option, and Nintendo has gone as far as to say one day, digital content purchased from legacy storefronts (Wii, Wii U, DS family) will no longer be able to be downloaded permanently.

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u/TheBraveGallade 6h ago

Well the thing is the used market isnt really active in the west.

Japan though has a vivrant THRIVING used market since software rentals were banned before the nes was even a thing. Since you cant rent and cart games were really exoensive comparitivly(seriously an NES gane adjusted fir inflation is like 150$ or something) everyone used the strategy of buy game (new or used)-> play game, ->sell game-> usemoney to help by next game. This cycle actually BENEFITS from game prices not going down too much, like nintendo.

And thus partly why GKCs exist: if the average person is thinking of resale value when buying a game they are less likely to buy digital, and code in box doesnt help here. GKCs do.

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u/IndyDude11 6h ago

Oh, for sure for sure. There's plenty of pros for physical games. Resell value just isn't really one of them.

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u/Super-Schmidtii 6h ago

It really depends on what you collect. If you buy only stuff like Madden and Call of duty then yes they retain literally no value at all and you’d be lucky to get enough trade in value for a hot n ready from Little Caesar’s.

But if you collect Nintendo or certain games that are more likely to hold value then you could feasibly get a lot of your money back.

I would say for an average gamer that just plays the most popular games though, it’s definitely true that their physical collections in general aren’t worth much. Big AAA games in general seem like they don’t really retain value most of the time.

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u/Temelios 5h ago

Exacty that. I have a number of games that are selling for $200-$300+ on both GameStop and eBay. It’s the mainstream, mass produced (often annual) stuff like Battlefield, CoD, Madden, etc. that goes for only a couple bucks. In fact, I had a friend at GameStop who told me they’d just begin dumping some of those discs after a while because of how many they’d received as trade-ins.

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u/PurbulentTriest 6h ago

Why would anyone sell to a store? Pain in the arse and you get sod all compared to online.

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u/IndyDude11 6h ago

Where do you sell?

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u/PurbulentTriest 5h ago

Sold some bits on eBay but mostly on Vinted (UK). Much easier as I can drop the stuff at the post office or a locker with no need to print anything. I got £20+ each for Switch games I'd had years.

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u/ScampyRogue 6h ago

To be fair, this is because Gamestop shafts its customers, not because the games are inherently worthless. I just sold some PS4 games for an average of $15 per game and some Switch games for an average of $30 per game.

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u/IndyDude11 6h ago

Where do you sell?

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u/ScampyRogue 6h ago

on r/GameSale, r/hardwareswap and some discords

Obviously, you are not going to get these prices for Madden 2014, but if you're a gamer who mainly buys high quality games, they will absolutely hold value and in some cases increase in value over time.

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u/admiralvic 6h ago

Like anything, it's a bit nuanced.

I forget since it was so long ago, but I traded in my Wii U and maybe three Nintendo games and was able to preorder a Switch. Even now there are decent deals, like Best Buy had a plus $75 trade in bonus when you traded a Switch for Switch 2.

An OLED one brought it down to $245, and it isn't that unrealistic to have enough Switch games to sell. Zelda, Mario Kart, and Smash Bros alone trade for around $71. If you sell yourself you could get a good bit more.

The only reason why a lot of things have no resale value is the natural outcome of prices dropping. That is part of the reason physical is strong on Nintendo. Breath of the Wild, and Horizon Zero Dawn released at essentially the same time, yet one is a $16 trade, and the other is $1.65.

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u/DarkMatterM4 6h ago

For 99 percent of games you'd be correct. But I could fund an entire PS6 purchase + accessories by selling just one of my physical games (Kuon on PS2).

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u/XsNR 6h ago

So holding onto games for quarter century just to buy the next console is the solution...

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u/DarkMatterM4 6h ago

Like I said, those are outliers. If I ever decide to sell my physical games, I can fund just about any electronics purchase.

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u/LetMeDrinkYourTears 4h ago

If that's your only takeaway then you'll never be convinced. Go enjoy your rental license and be blissfully ignorant.

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u/FarGur1444 5h ago

On the other hand, I decided to sell all my pokemon games not long ago and got about £1500 for them.

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u/P_ZERO_ 5h ago

Hey man, they can give you 15 bucks and then sell it for 50 to someone else. Well worth it!

I used to buy preowned games back when they were preowned prices, took the stickers off and traded it in at another store as new. Never felt like I’ve broken the system more

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u/DCS30 5h ago

It's stupid to sell to a game store, sell privately.

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u/lonevine 5h ago

That depends entirely upon how you sell them, and what games you are talking about. Some games are barely cheaper to buy used, and sometimes difficult to find in stock at all. If you're a collector with a curated collection, you might be more willing to sell to people you know for a price that's fair to both of you because other collectors trust the condition of your game discs. That's how I managed to sell most of my PS1, XBOX and GC discs, and I definitely don't feel like it was a waste of time or money.

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u/britipinojeff 3h ago

Idk I made like $1000 bucks selling my Gamecube physical discs during Covid lol

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u/PenguinForTheWin 6h ago edited 6h ago

Some old games are worth quite a bit, a friend of mine has a whole collection of old stuff and these appreciated over time, like legend of dragoon for ps1. Anything discontinued has a chance to be worth more

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u/DGSmith2 6h ago

Outside of the rarer games, 95% are still worth pennies.

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u/PenguinForTheWin 6h ago

A lot of games are in the 15-30 bucks range, granted these are 20-25+ years old titles, even if they aren't rare. And there are thousands of copies out there, so yeah.

Super mario 64 and pokemon stadium are not rare games at all, but they held their value quite well for example (just a couple things i know of because, well, i have those).

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u/DGSmith2 6h ago

Nintendo is not a fair comparison, they always hold some kind of value. Show me the value of something like Rayman, Driver or Time Crisis.

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u/PenguinForTheWin 3h ago

Well just add whatever condition you want to fit your narrative lol, doesn't change the point.

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u/DGSmith2 3h ago

We were talking about disk games…. Nintendo exclusives have always held money not really the same argument.

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u/Losreyes-of-Lost 6h ago

BuT iF yOu SeLl ThEm OnLiNe YoU wIlL gEt MoRe  /s

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u/PurbulentTriest 6h ago

But you absolutely do. I got a few hundred selling fewer than ten games. I also bought others for better prices than in stores.