Wedbush Securities’ analyst (who had a few harsh comments this year – the last time, he called the Hawaii anti-loot box legislators idiots…) thinks that the Xbox Play Anywhere approach could be successful, and he doesn’t believe the next consoles will come with no disk drive (aka Blu-ray drive).

Quoting him from the latest Pachter Factor: „Consoles are gonna exist. Consoles will very likely have disk drives, and the real reason for the slot for the disk is that you can’t sell a console without retailers (even if Amazon is a retailer). Because this is a physical good, you have to buy it at a retailer. You can’t download a console.

So, if you have to buy a console at retail, you can’t say to a retailer ‘Hey, please promote and sell my console but we’re not going to have any games available, so once you sell the console to your customer we’re going to take over the customer and own the relationship, we’re going to make them download everything and screw you, we’re never going to let you sell a game again’.

So, you have to give a concession to retailers that they can at least hold out the hope the consumer will come back and buy disks. The second reason for a disk drive is, there’s a healthy percentage of consumers – and I’d say about fifty percent – who value the concept of used games, either as a seller, as a trader, so they get value back, or as a purchaser because they’re cheap and they want to buy old games. I think used games have some value, some healthy number of consumers value used games. I don’t see disk drives going away.

Sony and Microsoft get consoles, they’ll keep doing consoles. Nintendo is going to keep doing consoles. Microsoft understands that we’re migrating to a PC structure, that’s why they launched Xbox Play Anywhere on Windows 10 PCs. I think Microsoft is going to flip the importance of Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox on the next cycle. Games are going to be promoted as PC playable; I don’t think that they’ll care if you play it on a PC or a tablet or an Amazon Echo device. You’re going to get evolution in smart devices in your home, whether it’s a laptop, tablet, smartphone, Google Home, or Apple TV. You’re going to get the trojan horse in your home where you buy a smart device that’s just going to have a GPU built in and you’re not going to know it.”

So, he thinks the Xbox might be onto something good, and used game sales (which are especially prevalent in regions of the world like Eastern Europe…) would survive into the next console generation. Not bad.

Source: WCCFTech