Everyone hates DRM, but it's the only reason Xbox can beat Sony's PlayStation 6

Gamers generally don’t like DRM, the Xbox feature known as Digital Rights Management. It was partially responsible for the world hurtling towards an all-digital future. Digital games are hard to share, and DRM is how the console enforces that.

Consumers are very unhappy with Sony’s choice to end physical media for PlayStation. Since the announcement, everything they’ve done has drawn an intense reaction. Livestreams have been plagued by “no disc, no buy” comments. Xbox hasn’t suffered the same fate for several reasons.

Microsoft’s new disc-to-digital feature has been met with near-universal praise, even though it doesn’t preserve physical media; it simply turns it from physical to digital. But it’s only possible because of DRM. And it might save the next Xbox versus the PlayStation 6.

Xbox has one hope against PS6, and it’s all down to a controversial feature

If you’ve ever tried to gameshare digital games on an Xbox, you know how silly and convoluted it can be. One must set another console as the “home Xbox,” which allows the other person access to the games. If offline, those games are inaccessible on the player’s actual console.

Sharing games with others is beneficial, but the changes extended to physical games, too. Discs were imprinted differently, and players have long been frustrated by DRM as a result. But with a gaming future that is all but assured to see the end of physical media sooner rather than later, DRM’s on a bit of a redemption tour.

According to Kotaku, discs produced with digital scanning in mind have enabled the disc-to-digital feature, giving Xbox a leg up in the never-ending console wars. To be clear, this is not preserving physical media. Those discs and cases will still become obsolete, but this gives them one more use. For comparison, PlayStation 4 and 5 discs will essentially be useless on the PS6.

Microsoft’s saving grace

Ironically, some discs cannot be digitized. The ones that were not made with DRM in mind are not able to be scanned now, giving value to the discs gamers were highly frustrated with originally. Currently, despite the plan to end physical disc production, Sony and PlayStation have a leg up in the console wars. The PS6 was likely to dominate its generation had nothing changed with physical media.

Sony and PlayStation are dominating the exclusive games battle (excluding Nintendo from this debate, of course), and the hardware is generally viewed as slightly superior to what Microsoft and Xbox have. So while Xbox will not have the next Ghost of Tsushima game or a future installment of God of War, the console has put in just a little more effort for consumers, and DRM is right at the heart of it.