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

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

#311

Post by binaryturtle »

steveBK123 wrote: post #144

This stuff is turning me into a physical media pre-2010s truther more and more by the day

I never upgraded beyond the PS2 (and I was a heavy console gamer back in the days), because all the "needs network", "needs account", "needs certificate to be valid", etc. stuff is entirely scaring me off investing my money in any of that.

Now, my motto is: if I can't run it safely in an emulator and download the files from some "abandoned wares" site then I don't care. And I have zero moral problems with that.

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

#312

Post by artemonster »

keiferski wrote: post #189
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 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.

microslop before invention of slop

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

#313

Post by thewebguyd »

f6v wrote: post #258
keiferski wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.

On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.

On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.

Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.

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

#314

Post by piltdownman »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #240
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…

I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.

uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.

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

#315

Post by inigyou »

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…

Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.

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

#316

Post by inigyou »

keiferski wrote: post #189
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 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.

Windows 2000,XP,7 may not have been perfect, but they were leagues better than the state of the art today.

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

#317

Post by tonymet »

Every modern media disk since DVD has had revocable DRM . That means you have never owned the disks. (Only Audio CDs and laser disks were owned digital media). With games, a synchronous right’s check is made every time you insert the disk, and if you haven’t played recently, the entire game installation is downloaded. The disk is only used for rights, not for playback. With movies, thankfully the rights check is done offline on your player, but a background online check can revoke your player’s keys, and revoke your entire collection. What’s more, a revocation can ship via another disk. So you can unplug your Blu-ray player for 2 years, insert a new disk, and lose your entire collection.

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

#318

Post by jerf »

jonhohle wrote: post #163
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…

> 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’…

Lock in isn't about physical versus digital. This came up a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138750

Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.

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

#319

Post by inigyou »

epistasis wrote: post #302
keiferski wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS…

Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).

Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.

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

#320

Post by michaelt »

keiferski wrote: post #189
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 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.

There were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind.

Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.

The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.

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