Today, I’ve been thinking a little bit about what that could mean for delisted games in the future, and specifically games that are digitally removed from the Xbox Store at some point during the current era before Project Helix comes along.
It still seems totally up in the air about whether Project Helix is going to support discs or not — and if the worst happens and we don’t get any form of disc-based feature in the next Xbox console, a delisted game will become instantly impossible to acquire as soon as it’s removed from the Xbox Store.
That’s not the case on Xbox One and Xbox Series X if you can buy that title in physical form, such as in the case of Forza Horizon 3 as seen at the top of the page. FH3 has been digitally delisted for years now, but you can still go and buy it in a shop (it’s £10 here in the UK at CEX), and then it’ll work just fine in your console.
The biggest question here is whether the disc-to-digital program will actually incorporate delisted titles or not, but it seems there’s no reason why it wouldn’t. Games that have been delisted on the Xbox Store are still available for existing owners to download (unless they’ve been “hard” delisted), so presumably it’d work the same way if you have the disc – you just insert it and access the game as if you own the digital version.
It’s possible that we could be looking at a future where, a decade from now, you can still play old delisted Xbox games on your modern-day console (if they still exist by then!) simply because the disc-to-digital program launched back in 2026. The best case scenario is that consoles are still shipping with disc drives at that point, but it seems unlikely.
That said, there are so many reasons why we want Xbox to consider supporting discs with Project Helix as a complement to the disc-to-digital program. One of them is because PlayStation is ceasing physical disc releases as of 2028, so Xbox has a chance to win over some disgruntled physical media fans in the process. Another is the reason why this article exists – we’re concerned about game preservation in an era where games are being delisted all the time. There are countless amazing Xbox titles that didn’t get a physical release and therefore have become lost media, but at least many of the disc-based releases continue to live on.