Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

birchtree.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 800 posts

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

#371

Post by inigyou »

walrus01 wrote: post #272
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6. The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version. You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube. Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video…

This assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.

Do we know any of the technical details of that? Is the SPC just instanced multiplayer with all game logic on the server, or is it just getting some encryption key?

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

#372

Post by djray »

tonymet wrote: post #324
djray wrote: post #281

This is false. You don't need an internet connection to play from disc: https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect... You can play digital titles, too, as long as your console is set to "Home". I played Forza Horizon 3 for days without internet a couple of months ago.

If you are offline, it will work for a few days that’s right. If you are online, and the rights service is failing, it will revoke your key. The trouble is, you would have to know about the outage first and go offline before attempting to play.

> If you are online, and the rights service is failing, it will revoke your key.

Do you have evidence of this? I've played Xbox for 25 years and never seen this.

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

#374

Post by philistine »

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…

> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones

Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible. Games that use draconian authentication could simply disappear. With GOG, the only thing stopping us from having easy access is our ability to walk to our local library.

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

#375

Post by inigyou »

sd9 wrote: post #195
unfocso wrote: post #173

The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber. No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles. In 2026 I can stil…

I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way. I’m not sure whether this is be…

We can't really expect public multiplayer experiences to remain the same across time, but surely you can play it in a LAN style.

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

#376

Post by fryanyway_swe »

inigyou wrote: post #322
f6v wrote: post #258

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.

Microsoft products are no longer ubiquitous. That's an early 2010s view. In 2026 most clients are running Android, followed by iOS, followed by Mac, and use Google Docs for their office work. Windows is only used on a per-company basis. If your company uses it it uses it, otherwise it doesn't.

Only small companies here (North EU - Sweden) use Mac + Gsuite + Slack + Zoom as a stack.

Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.

Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...

What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.

Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.

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

#377

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #270
paxys wrote: post #224

The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership. If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to: 1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion. 2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience. 3. Move it between my devices. 4. Backup and archive it. 5. Resell it. 6. Pass it on to my chil…

I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable? I am all for 1-4 and 6. But reselling digital copies is silly.

I read 5 as reselling the singular copy one owns similar to how a disc or cartridge can be resold.

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

#378

Post by inigyou »

pferde wrote: post #259
paxys wrote: post #224

The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership. If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to: 1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion. 2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience. 3. Move it between my devices. 4. Backup and archive it. 5. Resell it. 6. Pass it on to my chil…

Didn't you hear? Buying is not owning, according to these corporate criminals.

In fact they said that buying is stealing. They also said piracy is stealing. So if there's no difference I'll go with the cheaper one, thanks.

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

#379

Post by kokada »

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…

Not related to the Microsoft gaming division, but yes, Microsoft products are a mess. I am forced to use Office 365 to do some slides for work, and I decided to use Office for macOS so I could use Claude extension.

All went relatively well, until I needed to share the slides with others using Office 365: my first try of sharing the slides by clicking the Share button inside Office for macOS caused it to upload to SharePoint as read-only: not even myself (the document owner) could edit it.

I said "fine, I will just upload the .pptx file manually", and it worked well enough, until the file came back with some comments for fixes: now if I clicked the "Open on desktop" button, it kinda created a local copy that I could never sync with the remote one, but they're still clearly the same file because it did show as the same file when I went to properties on both desktop and web versions.

At that point I was getting really pissed off, so I started editing locally and copying my changes to the remote version. Office still had one more surprise: I could copy whole slides remotely, but copying part of a slide (say a rectangle form with some text) would instead convert that part to an image. Seriously, what the f*ck Microsoft?

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

#380

Post by inigyou »

kmeisthax wrote: post #350
paxys wrote: post #224

The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership. If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to: 1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion. 2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience. 3. Move it between my devices. 4. Backup and archive it. 5. Resell it. 6. Pass it on to my chil…

Yes, we all know it, but good luck finding a jurisdiction that will agree with you on this. One of the more galling aspects of the inevitable US-NATO[0] trade war is the fact that nobody is willing to reevaluate the legal underpinnings of US tech hegemony - namely, copyright and anticircumvention law. All the proposals for sovereign tech are really just "let's build more AI data centers". People like Cory Doctorow wh…

Circumvention is, in practice, legal as long as you don't get caught. Nothing except your own patience stops you from REing Apple's kexts right now. Or taking an always-online single player game and making it work offline. I suggest you don't publish the results on your own website, but find a group that specialises in hosting politically sensitive material.
Post reply on HN