Microsoft Imagines System Giving Disc-less Consoles Access to Physical Games
- Laurent Giret
- May 13, 2022
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A new Microsoft patent reveals that Microsoft is thinking about a solution for making physical games accessible on disc-less consoles, such as the company’s Xbox Series S. If digital video game sales now outnumber physical sales, Microsoft is apparently still thinking about gamers who still own a big collection of physical games.
Discovered earlier this week by Gamerant, the patent describes pretty well the emotional attachment some gamers can feel towards physical games. “These owners simply appreciate the “feel” of handling the physical video game media and/or the nostalgia associated with the physical video game media. Moreover, many of these owners view their libraries of physical video game media and paraphernalia as valuable collections, similarly to rare coins collections, baseball cards collections, etc,” the patent reads.
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Titled “Software ownership validation of optical discs using secondary device,” the new Microsoft patent describes a system where a disc-less console would access content from a physical disc by connecting to another device that has a disc drive. In the patent description, the disc-less console and the other device that can read physical discs could be on the same local network, but the system would also work across different networks as well as the Internet.
The patent also suggests that a previous generation console could be used to read the content of the optical disc. I’ll spare you the technical details, but the main idea behind this patent is “facilitating access to physical media on devices lacking physical media reading components.” The patent description also mentions “sharing software content ownership validation among multiple user devices, and providing options/setting for enabling software content ownership validation on one or more user devices.”
This patent was originally filed in November 2020, which is right when Microsoft released its Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. A month earlier, Xbox head Phil Spencer told Kotaku that he expected the disc-less Series S to end up outselling the Series X during this new console generation. What sounded pretty crazy at the time could actually happen given the fact that Microsoft’s Xbox Series S is easier to manufacture than the more expensive Series X, which remains very hard to find due to the ongoing chip shortages.
In some way, this new patent is reminiscent of the ‘disc-to-digital’ program that Microsoft was reportedly working on ahead of the launch of its Xbox One S All Digital console back in 2019. Microsoft was said to be working on a system that would allow Xbox gamers to trade in their physical discs at participating retailers to get a digital download code, but the program never materialized. Anyway, the software giant may now have opted for a different approach to make disc-less consoles more attractive, though as is often the case with patents, this idea may well never see the light of day.