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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

#501

Post by ticulatedspline »

olivierestsage wrote: post #469
walrus01 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me. From 2013 PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/6…

Most interesting part of this for me is the lukewarm response it gets from the initial replies. The sense of humor here was ahead of its time.

the original was 4chan[1] , then it circulated around. It had better reactions elsewhere at the time.

[1] https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos...

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

#502

Post by bakies »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #484
bakies wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the device works fine if valve shuts down. It's a PC. The games are gone, sure.

>the games are gone, sure That’s the entire thing this conversation revolves around…

You keep bringing up devices because the threads about xbox, but valve devices are fundamentally different where they will keep working without any valve services. They can even play games.

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

#503

Post by WhyNotHugo »

I buy games via Humble Bundle when possible. They give you a link to download a DRM free copy, which I store away in a large drive.

In practice, I often end up playing those games on the Steam Deck, but I know that in 20 years (if I keep that drive alive), I'll be able to easily spin up wine and play those games just fine.

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

#504

Post by wvenable »

inigyou wrote: post #404
fryanyway_swe wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else stated earlier, the NT kernel is actually great. I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is. The whole ecosyste…

The NT kernel was actually an IBM project, which got divorced from IBM because of contract stuff and Microsoft got to keep a copy. It grew out of VMS which was a heavyweight OS for DEC VAXen, which IBM acquired.

That is not correct at all.

Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.

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

#505

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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…

Meh, perhaps games from big studios, but the majority of games work fine without DRM. I find indie games and games from small studio a lot more fun and have a lot more soul than most "big studio" games.

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

#506

Post by andrewla »

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…

The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy.

*Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them?

The best we have is to have some sort of ownership token that is maintained in a shared store, and build a requirement that possession of that token is required to use the data. Even this is practically nearly intractable; you have to have some sort of "trusted" hardware or software that is responsible for validating the current possession of the ownership token before using the data.

Physical media is another way of trying to solve this problem, especially if the physical media can somehow be verified and is exfiltration-proof.

[1] I say "technology" here but really I strongly suspect that this is actually impossible given reasonable theoretical assumptions around what data means.

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

#507

Post by epistasis »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #440
epistasis wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer. Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.

Is it 2019 again?

Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.

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

#508

Post by Someone »

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.

> 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 don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.

If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.

(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)

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

#509

Post by jazzpush2 »

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 had a similar experience this weekend. Some friends got together, one got the new Halo campaign, and we looked forward to playing co-op, like the good ol' days.

Well, adding a screensplit co-op now requires a log-in, which requires a phone to register via a QR code, which, after about 5 minutes of trying, completely failed. So we just turned it off and played Catan.

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

#510

Post by jazzpush2 »

franze wrote: post #196
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…

the hardware is good but it is so hard to give them money on it i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time

Microsoft harder is good? Relative to what?

Xbox, the topic of discussion, is literally famous for a 'red ring' hardware failure.

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