Microsoft Could Release Xbox One Next Year with no Disc Reader

There are two ways to buy games today, on disc and as a digital download. A new report is going around that Microsoft might launch an Xbox One next year that has no disc reader. If true, this would mean it only plays games that stream or download. The lack of a physical media reader could herald the end of used game sales.

We rarely buy download games in my house, not because we have a problem waiting for games to download, but because we want to be able to sell the games at GameStop or trade for credit towards a new game when we tire of them. You can’t do that with a digital game. The removal of the Blu-Ray drive will reportedly make the Xbox One cheaper with a price of around $199 reports TechCrunch.

That is about $50 cheaper than you can find the Xbox One S at today. The other big problem with download games is that all that data has to be stored on a local hard drive and the drive fills up very fast, especially with some of the recent giant games like Fallout 76 and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Microsoft needs to cram a drive that is much larger than a single terabyte into the disc-less console. Microsoft is undoubtedly aligning this disc-free console at people who subscribe to Xbox Game Pass. Another rumor claims that Microsoft is working on an Xbox One S with a disc drive that is cheaper. If the only way to get games on the disc-less Xbox One is streaming or download, the console needs the largest hard drive possible. An Xbox with a 10TB HDD sounds good to me.