Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc • Hacker News Board

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#161

Post by shakow » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

grumbel wrote: post #132

glimshe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.

DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all. If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up try…

> There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.

I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.

> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.

That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#162

Post by ramijames » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:57 PM UTC

I'll never buy one of these systems because I want to be able to play my games in 20 or 30 years.

I just bought a Nintendo 64 and a Wii and it's great just being able to play my games with my kids and know that in five years nothing will change.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#163

Post by jonhohle » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #20

cautiouscat wrote: post #9

Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…

General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I ha…

> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.

I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#164

Post by Lord-Jobo » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #159

mawadev wrote: post #151

I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, cou…

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work. Office on the web is…

It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#165

Post by macspoofing » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

cautiouscat wrote: post #9

Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…

>Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. I

It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#166

Post by nemomarx » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 1:58 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #47

flerchin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Hard. No. 2. Fame-inducing. No. 3. Illegal. Maybe where you live.

Really? You cracked Denuvo?

Denuvo cracks have sped up a lot lately, and usually take two months or less.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#167

Post by anilakar » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

mawadev wrote: post #151

I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, cou…

Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#168

Post by ToucanLoucan » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

mawadev wrote: post #151

I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, cou…

And the Steam version is distinctly better to boot. The XBox Store version last I tried just straight up didn't work.

Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#169

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

ragazzina wrote: post #88

jerf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I ha…

>and I maintained it How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?

Plenty of dumb CD and DVD players on the market, and flea market for that matter.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#170

Post by dartharva » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #164

epistasis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work. Office on the web is…

It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.

All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.