Earlier this year, Xbox announced the new Disc-to-Digital program that allows users to take their physical collections and digitise them, probably in preparation for the next-gen Xbox being a digital-only machine. One of the limitations was that only Xbox One and Xbox Series X discs were supported because the discs themselves require a unique identifier embedded in the disc. These identifiers aren’t present on the older discs; hence Xbox 360 and OG Xbox games aren’t part of the program.
Unless something has changed. We’re going to take a wander down Speculation Avenue for this one, folks, and the likelihood is this is all just a mistake on Xbox’s end. A really, really, REALLY big mistake. Let me explain.
In a new post on the Xbox Wire titled Available for Xbox Insiders: More Ways to Personalise your Home, Library, and Guide, there’s a subsection discussing how the newest update for Insiders adds a few new ways to organise digital licenses for disc-based games. Basically, they’re getting their own tab within your library. Nothing too exciting. The image Xbox uses to show this off contains a few games like Fallout 76, Forza Horizon 5 and Diablo IV. It also contains something odd: Fable 3. As in, Fable 3 on the Xbox 360, complete with the disc-to-digital icon.
This seems like a clear tease that somehow Xbox has found a way around the limitations of the Xbox 360 discs! Hurrah! Imagine the possibilities!
There is one massive flaw in this piece of speculation, though, and that’s that the more you look, the weirder the image becomes. For a start, Avowed is also listed in the new disc-to-digital tab. Avowed has never had a physical disc on Xbox and therefore is not part of the disc-to-digital program by default. So unless this image is also teasing a physical release of Avowed, we already know something’s wrong.
It then gets weirder, because the image also shows Forza Horizon 5, Forza Horizon 6, and Forza Motorsport, none of which are currently supported by the disc-to-digital system. It has been speculated that this is due to licensing issues, although neither Microsoft nor Xbox has publicly confirmed this. So maybe this image is also teasing that those are being added to the system as well?
In the end, this is baffling whichever way you look at it. If we assume the image was deliberately chosen, then Microsoft could be teasing multiple things: Xbox 360 games being added to the Disc-to-Digital programme, alongside the Forza games that have so far been conspicuously absent.
On the other hand, we could simply be looking at a massive cock-up. And if that’s the case, it’s a genuinely impressive one, because Microsoft has somehow managed to include five games that don’t belong there. One is an Xbox 360 title, despite those discs apparently lacking the unique identifiers required by the system. Another is Avowed, which has literally never received a physical Xbox disc release. And then there are three Forza games which, for reasons that remain unclear, aren’t supported by Disc-to-Digital despite having perfectly compatible physical releases.
Either Microsoft has accidentally teased some rather interesting changes, or somebody has put together one hell of a misleading promotional image and is potentially being beaten with a very large stick as I write this.
