Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
I suppose the argument is in reverse. They are so ubiquitous, they don’t really have to be good anymore to capture the market.
Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
301–310 of 796 posts
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#302Earlier 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 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
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point. A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to b…
With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic. https…
That's what collection is for.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#304Earlier 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 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.
Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable , and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements. And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
The whole "make it harder for pirates to watch in 4K" makes no sense to me, like it comes out of the psychology of people who couldn't possibly understand the psychology of other people at all. My experience is that people don't care about quality . Like there was that time I found a torrent for a movie that had 3000 seeds and found that it was shot with a camcorder in the theater and the soundtrack was in Russian bu…
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#306I 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…
Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Xbox's defence, pretty seamless. I am signed into my xbox account, which is a Microsoft account. When launcing a game all that account auth bullshit is taken care of. My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa…
No idea why this is being downvoted, because it accurately describes the Xbox experience.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know and let me spice this up with another story: I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet. What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.
??? It's not the early 1990s anymore where you had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and assigning IRQs to get your DOS games to run. The only "downside" of PC gaming is that the hardware isn't subsidized like game consoles are, so you're upfront investment is a couple hundred bucks more. But then you don't need a subscription for multiplayer gaming, and PC games are cheaper (80 Euros for a game? come on...)
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#309historically, at least for me, games never worked... i spent more time fixing why they didnt work or debugging them in memory to patch them to get the game to actually run then actually playing a game. This is circa 1983-1987 too so maybe we have progressed from there, but obviously not much.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
Maybe I'm old school, but the primary lesson Limewire taught me was to always check the media before you show it to someone else.
Every 'issue' that you mentioned about wrong episode, wrong language, etc. If those are the costs to ride the ride then so be it. No CEO gets paid in 'had to redownload a different version'.