Xbox Series X Update Makes Great Change To Game Installs

Physical games? What are those? Just kidding. Nice of them to improve the user experience for gamers who still buy physical.

Always buy physical when I can. Now more than ever since they have started to change things to be more 'sensitive'.

On Xbox, I have decided to go all digital. Its the only platform (other than PC) where I buy digital games. Because of this, the change wont impact me much, if at all, but I am still glad they doing this for preservation purposes.

I'm kind of surprised there was an online check before after the Xbone launch disaster. Surprising they're actually improving that though considering how little of the XB ecosystem uses discs at all, and their best selling machine doesn't even have a disc drive. That's a nice perk for the physical-dedicated players.

@Tharsman It's a slippery slope. I bought my X1X to be my "all digital" platform. And I ended up changing how I manage games so much I had to go digital on PS and Switch eventually, too.....

All I want is any game I buy to be fully available to play offline. End of story.

i buy physical when buying at launch, since i can play the game and resell it, making some quick money back.
Also if buying used is cheaper than digital.

@NEStalgia My method of digital management, I dont think would work with PS or Switch. I have a 12 TB external HD drive I use to archive all my digital games. It's a bit of a beast and requires extremal power, I cant see myself doing the same for PS and simply is not an option on Switch.

I also don't really trust neither Sony nor Nintendo with long-term access to my digital library. I do trust Microsoft because they are basically gambling their entire future on the premise of pc-style backwards compatibility, they even moved most 360 games from the old 360 market place into the modern one at a time when both other competitors simply shuttered (or attempted to) their digital storefronts.

Yes, it can be a bit of a bum to realize I need to go to my shelves to grab my next Nintendo Switch game, but it's not like that happens multiple times a day.

@Tharsman Yeah I did that on the X1X. I had multiple backup HDDs. With the XSXS I've stopped doing that. I think I've gained more confidence in XB's backup and availability level of trustworthiness. I think it's when I loaded Deus Ex Human Revolution and it still had my cloud save from 2011 that I started to really trust that they actually are a reliable service for holding your data long term.

PS...yeah...external hard drives were painful on PS4, and more painful on 5. I definitely get it. And we know how Nintendo goes. I debated hard with digital on Nintendo especially. But then I remembered that I have a vast physical 3DS library and 6 3DS's around and I haven't touched one of them since 2017 and the batteries are probably well and dead by now.... Which is sad because i love 3DS, my favorite platform. I'm hoping with Switch 2 Nintendo starts copying the industry with digital purchases (and includes a slot loader for switch 1 physical). But I do have some doubts.

@SinfulDestroyer 2.5 pennies if you open up a GameStop credit card account.

The ability to install games to different drives is a big deal for the Series X, where you can setup your high speed drives around nothing but X/S games and a USB external drive for older titles.

@KonstantTrouble What do you mean by that?

Thanks for letting us play the games we own Xbox!

@PringleMuffin The removal of jokes from GTA 5 and also considering the changes to Warcraft with artwork being changed and jokes being removed.

Does this mean you no longer need a disk in the system to play the game once it’s installed?

@themightyant Thanks for that. Shame the disks are still needed.

I've been all digital since the early days of XB1 & have expanded that to 360 titles

HOWEVER I am very concerned by recently noticing that my XB1 download version of FIFA15 no longer works on my "home" console or even shows up on my purchase history on other machines

Support informed me that the game has been "delisted & removed" and was told ALL XBOX DIGITAL LICENSES HAVE BEEN REVOKED ie it is impossible to play a downloaded version of the game & it will not work offline - I suspect that something has gone wrong with the delisting process with having gamepass ultimate & owning the game

Also very irritated by the fact that many 360 games will not now download to my 360s - gets to 99% then keeps looping back to 0%

The problem is fully playable games are getting to the point where they don't fit in a disc.

I'd they used the same capacity disc as a 4k movie it would effectively triple the cost of that disc. If they include 2 discs that's a cost issue and it would be annoying for users since you need that day 1 and day 100 patch.

There are always reasons things are the way they are but removing the check that they just removed is great.

The main reason for the check on anything big is because you can download games you don't own so you could in theory have a 2 disc game, give a disc to someone so they can play and you can play..

It's not a punishment. It's also less strict than PC drm and without some protections nobody will release games.

@GlasgowGuy I've never had 1 of my 200+ 360 games fail to install...

Are you on the insider dash? If you are I'd leave the insider dash program because it's always caused issues like that..

If the security layer on a disc is damaged and it can't get the full key then that could do it too.

What are a few games (and are they digital or disc) that won't install?

@d0x3601 - thanks for reading - to clarify, the problem is with downloading some 360 games onto my xbox 360 consoles, they will get to 99% downloaded & then reset to 0% and this keeps going in an endless loop - this is not an XBox One issue - a school of though is it is related to ISP and your dns ipv4 servers and it happens on multiple 360 consoles and games that are backwards compatible on XB1 seem to be the majority of the titles that no longer download to my 360s

The separate issue I have on XB1 is that apparently my & everyone else's digital license for FIFA 15 has been revoked.
It no longer appears in my purchase history & I therefore cannot install it on my XB1's, and where I did have it previously installed it no longer works, despite it being my home console and online or offline makes no difference; the only thing I can see is that there is no acquisition date when you look at the properties tab in my games & apps. My though is that something has gone wrong with the delisting process and having gamepass ultimate, where it was available as a EAPlay title