THE FIRST ALL DIGITAL CONSOLE IS HERE, IS THAT A GOOD THING?

Microsoft has officially unveiled the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition and it launches May 7 for $250 or roughly P13,000 converted. It’s bundled with Minecraft, Forza Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves, and is similar to the normal Xbox One S except that it has no disk drive at all. Aside from the unfortunate Xbox SAD acronym, the thought of an all-digital console—the home of the tactile pleasure that is inserting a fresh game disk—makes us go "Hmm."

The idea behind this is that newcomers to Xbox will be okay with getting their titles through the Xbox Game Pass—a monthly subscription which gives you access to over 250 games. Buying games digitally or through a subscription isn’t new, but being locked into that as your only way to get new stuff on a home console is the novelty here. If this is the wave of the future, perhaps Microsoft is still trying it out safely by not making the more expensive Xbox X its all digital guinea pig.

But what about the pleasures of physical media? Like sharing games with friends? Aside from borrowing old stuff, there’s that classic arrangement when too many new games come out at the same time–you buy game A, friend buys game B, and you swap when you’re done. You can argue that a subscription like the $14.99 monthly Game Pass Ultimate is cheaper than buying a single game outright though.

We still remember how Sony trolled Microsoft over this issue before.

But the bigger issue would be having no control over your “game collection.” Older titles can be taken off at any time. If it’s a favorite of yours then you have no choice but to purchase it outright. All new titles (such as The Division 2) aren’t guaranteed to come out on Game Pass either—meaning it’s not the end of buying standalone games anyway.

The other hassle would be download times and game sizes—Red Dead Redemption 2 needs 100GB alone! So flipping back to older games would mean redownloading and a wait—not so bad if you’re blessed with fiber internet, but almost unthinkable on a DSL connection.

Finally, going subscription also nukes the resale value of your games to nothing. Xbox Game Pass titles are unplayable if your subscription lapses. Again this might not be a big deal for some, but a lot of gamers do trade-ins of older titles to finance new buys.

People must have felt this way when physical media for music died, and look how it’s totally normal to have your tunes delivered by streaming. It’s the beginning of the same process for video games. Will we all be as happy in the end as we are with our Spotify playlists today?