Microsoft‘s recent XBOX shake-up has been nothing short of brutal. Yet it may have done more than cancel projects and cut jobs. According to new comments from industry insiders, it may have also derailed a plan that would have made Project Helix come on top of PlayStation 6. The next-gen Xbox console was supposed to come with physical game disc support instead of going full digital.
“This is just kind of like, you know, potential rumory stuff, but at least before the current Xbox reset, […] Microsoft was actually very much going to continue disc support,” editor John Linneman claimed he’d heard from sources during the latest DF Direct podcast. “Not because they valued retail disc sales, but because they wanted to, like, ensure that all your Xbox games were still playable on new Xboxes.”
This comes at a time when the internet is in uproar over Sony’s decision to stop producing physical games starting in 2028. Unlike Sony, Microsoft has not announced any plan to drop support for physical discs in the future. However, Windows Central’s Jez Corden suggested that the company may take the same approach for the next console generation.
According to Corden, Microsoft may no longer want to pay licensing fees and the disc drive cost for Project Helix, making it a ‘fully digital system.’ Still, he believed the company could let its users convert physical games into digital licenses, potentially through an external USB Blu-ray drive.
What Linneman said of XBOX’s reset, too, has been nothing short of dramatic. Back in February, longtime CEO Phil Spencer and president Sarah Bond departed, with Asha Sharma officially taking over. She immediately signaled a major course correction, writing in a memo that she wanted to restore the scrappier, ‘renegade spirit’ that built XBOX in the first place. Since then, Sharma has kept the changes coming.
Earlier this month, Sharma announced what she called XBOX’s ‘most significant restructure,’ cutting roughly 4,800 jobs company-wide across multiple gaming divisions. It included spinning Double Fine Productions back into an independent studio and moving Senua’s Ninja Theory to new ownership. Then, just this week, after a 7% drop in annual revenue, Sharma sent employees another memo outlining four priorities for the year ahead.
According to the memo read by The Verge, the plan aims to return XBOX to growth by the end of fiscal year 2027 and puts the company halfway toward its goal of one billion daily users by 2030. The latest round also brought thousands more layoffs and more studios being spun off.
“But I do see a future where Microsoft actually supports discs going forward […] while Sony just completely cuts people off,” Linneman hoped and expected Project Helix to come with a detachable disc drive. Details of the Digital Foundry talk can be heard around the 26-minute mark on the video above.
For now, though, physical game support for the next Xbox console remains unclear. Gamers and collectors can only hope that preserving their disc libraries wasn’t left behind during the dramatic reset.
