Xbox Disc to Digital Feature Is Now Live

If you haven't heard Microsoft have introduced a new feature on Xbox that allows you to convert all your physical copies of games to digital ones, this is made possible because each Xbox One and Series disc has its own unique identifier (and if you're wondering why each disc has a unique identifier, well it wasn't originally for any good reasons, in fact it's a big part of the reason why Xbox lost the PS4/XboxOne generation, but that's another story). Anyway, once you have converted your game to digital it is then tied to your account, if the disc is put in another console using a different account the digital license will be transferred to the new account and you will lose access on yours.

Xbox Series games can be converted to digital using Xbox One consoles and vice versa. Xbox360 and OG Xbox discs aren't compatible as they have no unique identifiers.

Claiming games is as easy as logging into your account on a console and putting in a disc, and once it starts installing a message will automatically pop up telling you it's been converted to a digital license if it's compatible, or if you're converting multiple discs, like I did last night, you can turn off autoplay in your consoles settings, insert the disc and hit the options button on the thumbnail when it appears and choose "create digital copy" instead of messing around with every disc trying to auto-install.

Not all games can currently be converted, here's a complete list of games that can https://xct.live/disc2digital

So why is this good? What's the point? Well there's a couple of reasons why I think this is really good.

For the first reason I'm going to use the new game Control Resenant as an example. That game can be converted to a digital license and it is also part of Xbox's Play Anywhere program, which means that when you convert your console disc to digital license you will also get access to the PC version of the game. This is great because you can now buy 2nd hand games to convert to PC games, and depending on how widely adopted the disc to digital feature is by different publishers, and also how much longer games are going to still be sold on physical media, we could start seeing situations where it's cheaper to buy a physical Xbox copy of a new release game and then convert it to digital to gain access to the PC version than it is to buy the digital only PC version at launch, and not only could this potentially allow you to buy the games for cheaper at launch it'll also leave you with a physical Xbox disc that you can sell off once you're finished playing them, which is great for those one and done single player games, now you can recoup a bit of money back after finishing them instead of having them just sitting unplayed in your digital library until the end of time.

This is a win/win for PC players. The only downside is that you're stuck using the Xbox app for Windows to play your PC games on.

Same as with the disc to digital program not all Xbox games are play anywhere so not all of them will give you access to the PC versions, but a lot will, the new 007 First Light and Blood of Dawnwalker for example. Here's a complete list https://www.xbox.com/en-NZ/games/browse?PlayWith=XboxPlayAny…

The second reason why this is good news is that Series S and Digital Xbox One console owners can now buy cheap 2nd hand physical copies of games and convert them so they can play them on their consoles instead of being stuck paying the often highly inflated digital store prices, all they need is a friend or someone with a disc version Xbox that they can log into and convert their games.