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

birchtree.me

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

#182

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-herrin…

well there is a way

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

#183

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…

In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.

You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.

I like Gog and use Heroic, but that has not been a smooth experience on Steam Deck.

It’s slowly improving, though.

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

#186

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 the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up... So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your…

I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?

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

#187

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…

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage. And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!

When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.

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

#188

> "But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license..." Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it. Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it. It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges.…

The issue with owning discs now is they tend to not even have the full game on them. They either shipped the discs before the game was done so there's something practically unplayable on the disc, or sometimes it's a demo and you have to download the remaining 95% of the game. The one advantage it has over digital for the time being is you can resell it, assuming they didn't lock a bunch of content behind a one-time-use download code in the box.

And this isn't anything new. Mortal Kombat X came out 11 years ago and the disc had 2 characters and a basic tutorial on it. To get the rest of the game you had to download it.

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

#189

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 is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.

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

#190
I don't have a console other than an old PS4 rarely used and I was going to buy a PS5 until the recent news. Now I don't want to buy xbox because of this post. So, what's left? I have a kid and little time and I haven't been a "gamer" since I was a teenager but I want to be able to play maybe 5 or 6 games (co-ops, FIFA, GTA) without downloading anything.

It's even more annoying for me because I often have phases of only playing every 2 months, so it's always true that I would need to update first.

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