The new model will not ship with the Blu-ray drive, cutting the price slightly by $50. Microsoft includes a 1TB HDD on this new digital model alongside digital versions of Forza Horizon 3, Sea of Thieves, and Minecraft in the box. It is the same hardware as the Xbox One S just without the 4K Blu-ray drive.

Jeff Gattis, general manager of Platform and Devices Marketing at Microsoft said: “The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition is $50 less than Xbox One S and we expect to maintain at least this price difference between the two consoles". This is $50 less than the recommended retail price of $299 for the existing Xbox One S, but there are often bundle deals available for around $230. It’s not clear if we’ll see similar bundles for this all-digital version.

Vole is testing the waters for digital-only gear. It had planned something like that for the Xbox One so that users share any games digitally. However, there was a backlash over the used games policies and online checking forced the company to bottle on the idea.

Microsoft has been aggressively pushing its Xbox Game Pass recently, a subscription service that provides access to more than 100 Xbox games. Xbox Game Studios titles like Sea of Thieves and Crackdown 3 launch first on the service, and Microsoft even recently added Minecraft to Xbox Game Pass. A disk-less console with a digital Xbox Games Pass subscription is now a reality. Microsoft is working on an xCloud game streaming service that will stream digital games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices.