Yesterday's mammoth leak of Microsoft documentation was eye-opening for all sorts of reasons, not least because it laid bare the company's tentative hardware plans for the back half of this console generation. But the scale of the leak was only part of the surprise. Equally stunning was Microsoft's plan - circa April 2022, at least - to ditch physical media altogether in new Xbox consoles from next year, for what it privately described as an "adorably all digital" future.
Of course, Microsoft has now responded - via a short social media post from Xbox boss Phil Spencer that quickly sought to reframe the leak as outdated without getting into the details of exactly what would now be different. But in just three sentences, the emphasis was clear: Spencer tripled down on what the internet had seen as being "old", adding that "so much had changed" and that Xbox would "share the real plans" when ready.
And thank goodness, right? Because anything else would have been outright confirmation that Xbox was killing discs for good in the next 12 months. And if you're someone who still buys physical copies of games, or uses your console to play older games from past generations, or simply someone who cares about game preservation, Microsoft's outdated plans were a disaster. Such a move would have marked a monumental shift by Microsoft away from disc-based media, to a future where playing games relies solely on unsharable digital licences or ongoing subscription memberships.
It would also be bad for the 4k Blu-ray market as you'd be removing the ability to play them from one of the most ubiquitous UHD disc players in people's homes. And here I was wondering if the last machines in this phase might push the players to include all the fancy HDR and audio formats, when Microsoft were planning on doing the opposite. Now we just don't know what those plans are, it could still be on the cards.
