It is very apparent that Microsoft wants to eliminate physical media this year with Walmart starting to send back physical copies of Starfield on Xbox. After the major layoffs at Microsoft, a report shared that the company ended internal divisions on physical releases.

According to Christopher Dring of GamesIndustry.biz, many European retailers have begun not selling physical Xbox games. He talks about this on the Microcast where he talks about how Xbox is such a digital console now:

“So they’ve just started not stocking Xbox games anymore, Xbox is such a digital console, the physical performance of games is really low, and ultimately when you’re selling a console that most people are just downloading games for, it doesn’t really benefit the retailer very much.

“The margin on hardware is often quite small. I wasn’t able to corroborate that, I couldn’t find which retailer these are, but it was a proper senior European publishing boss who said it to me.”

Thank you to VGC for quoting this.

You can see the timestamp on YouTube below:

It wouldn’t be a surprise that Microsoft officially ends physical support for every game they develop with the release of the Xbox Series X Digital Console likely coming this year. The digital trend will continue with Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 as it was announced to be available as a digital-only title.

This is only a report and nothing was made official, but it lines up with what Microsoft is doing in North America.

Do you like what Microsoft is doing with the future of games?

Source: VGC