Why you want a disc drive on your PlayStation or Xbox

Whether you’re buying the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X, you’ve got a choice to make: do you want a built-in disc drive or not?

Both the PS5 and the Xbox give you the choice between models with a built-in optical drive and models without. In both cases, the model with the disc drive will generally cost at least $50 more.

So is it worth it?

One might assume it’s a matter of saving space on your console by playing them off a disc rather than downloading them — but that’s not quite right. For the sake of load times and performance, both the Xbox and the PlayStation 5 copy the entire game onto their internal storage drives. You’ll generally need the same amount of space free on the console either way.

The biggest upside of the disc drive really boils down to one thing: the ability to resell games (or give them away!) when you’re done with them.

Across the modern era of consoles, once you buy a digital copy of a game that’s the end of it — it’s yours, it’s tied to your account, and there’s no passing it onto another owner later.

With a physical copy, however, the choice is yours. Beat a game and don’t think you’ll play it anymore? Sell it! Give it to a friend! Donate it to a local library! You have the option to make some of your money back rather than letting the game collect dust, and now someone else gets to enjoy it too.

Even if you like to hang on to your games, there are other upsides:

- Backwards compatibility: Both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X can run many games from their previous generations… but unless you want to re-purchase the digital versions, you’ll need the disc drive to play them.

- Blu-ray/DVD support: Even if you stream 99% of the content you watch, the Blu-ray player found on either console can save the day when you’re looking to watch something that’s not available online.

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