Last month, we reported on Microsoft's plan to allow gamers who own Xbox game discs to play those games digitally on their consoles.
Recently, during the Gamescom Cologne game announcement event, Microsoft confirmed that the feature will begin testing through the XBOX Insider program starting August 31, 2026. They also revealed some details about how the program will begin testing.
First, you'll need to register your XBOX account to join the XBOX Insider program, which gives you access to beta features that are still being tested and before they're widely introduced. Second, the feature will be tested on XBOX One and XBOX Series X consoles first, as these are modern consoles that still have physical disc readers.
XBOX says that several thousand games on the XBOX One and XBOX Series X platforms already support this digitization feature, so if you have a console and a physical game disc on either platform, you will be able to access this digitization feature starting August 31st.
Once users have met all the initial requirements to access this feature and the XBOX Insider update has been downloaded, users will be asked if they want to digitize their physical game licenses. Once the process is complete, users will not only be able to play their games digitally without using a physical disc, but also play their games through the XBOX Play Anywhere and XBOX Cloud Gaming services.
Microsoft says that they will add supported games over time, but confirmed that several thousand XBOX One and XBOX Series X games will already be supported when the disc digitization testing phase is introduced.
