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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

#531

Post by TuringTourist »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #510
franze wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not sure it's fair to equate the xbox 360 with the current generation which is the Xbox Series X/S, which was preceded by the Xbox One X/S, so the 360 is two base iterations old at this point.

Not that I am defending M$FT here. I'm just clarifying so we don't drift into calling everything a "Nintendo" like my parents did.

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

#532

Post by pipes »

thewebguyd wrote: post #313
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.

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…

Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves.

Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.

There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility. Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.

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

#533

Post by cogman10 »

jerf wrote: post #260
altmanaltman wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you're quite getting it. I'm saying, don't get in the box . "But the bait looks so nice!" Yes. Yes it does. Yes, you may have to sacrifice and not get some things you want in the moment. Our capitalistic overlords have demonstrated that they will absolutely abuse you to the maximum extent you permit. If you are willing to give everything to play GTA 6, then they will take it. The compensation is that th…

I generally agree, but I don't think it's wrong to mourn what is lost or to try and advocate politicians regulate and restore what was lost. Especially since the policy of "the customers own nothing" has been extending past video games in ways that are unavoidable. For example, John Deere locking down their tractors. Car manufacturers increasingly trying to turn everything into a subscription.

I agree, the right action as a consumer is boycotting rent seeking products and pestering politicians. But it does feel hopeless as too few of our politicians seem to care about these sorts of seemingly minor grievances.

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

#534

Post by BiteCode_dev »

jerf wrote: post #20
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…

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…

Or for cheaper, you can sail the high sea. You build a collection of music, movies and games that will last you a lifetime for free. Then you can spend the saved money on supporting artists you like, studios you respect or buy a locked on guilty pleasure once in a while.

No reason to play by the rules if decency is not in the picture anymore.

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

#535

Post by tonymet »

Reubachi wrote: post #466
tonymet wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why I’m getting downvoted. It’s true, and on topic? It’s also relevant, with all the discussions about owning your own media. Weird.

HN and other comment/article aggregation tools use votefuzzing to obfuscate the API to deter spambots. Not saying that's happening here, but 99 times out of a 100 it's either a spambot or the autofuzz, not someone deriding your opinion.

Thanks I’ll look into that. The past few months I’ve had really suspicious downvoting so I’ve been suspicious.

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

#536

Post by ponector »

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…

>> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.

Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!

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

#538

Post by WorldMaker »

f055 wrote: post #323
jonhohle wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’…

I would hope an old Xbox One disconnected from LAN and WiFi, with a GTA VI DVD inside, could start the game just fine.

Ironically, Xbox One support for true offline play was gutted when Xbox gutted a lot of planned Family Sharing support when Sony claimed the Xbox One was not going to allow you to play games offline and made that a marketing campaign with pawn shops like GameStop. (The same campaign that also called in-box Kinect a mistake and complained that the Xbox One was too "media focused" and "not for real game players".)

The resulting early Xbox One pivot removed features that would have been useful when systems were down and replaced them with "offline capable theater" instead. (The same pivot that also killed the Kinect and Xbox One multitasking and host of other useful media features.)

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

#539

Post by righthand »

inigyou wrote: post #386
righthand wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?

Has the barrier for non technical consumer gone down? Back in the 90s when some game didn't work because of some weird issue (we had two CD drives and it would refuse to detect the CD in either drive) my parents had no problem downloading a pirated one that didn't need a CD. You wouldn't have to figure it out yourself. They didn't need a hex editor. But they did understand "download this file, go to this part of Prog…

No my point here is that you have to download and install Steam before you can download and install any games. Now if I’m non-technical why would I want to make the extra effort to go Drm free if I have to use Steam anyways?

I know technical people can do it, but I do not believe this is a path for the non-technical user.

The proposed steps are:

- buy game on steam marketplace (no client) - download and install games (client required) - uninstall steam client and paste in fake dll file

But now I want more games… so rinse and repeat? This is a lot of work.

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

#540

Post by devil1432 »

People focus too much on discs and cartridges, but too little on licensing and drm. The disc is meaningless if you cannot run it after drm servers died. Also, very often the game on the disc is unplayable because of lack of day-1 patch. Meanwhile you can burn games you bought from GOG on a cd and play it 10 years later without internet connection. So the physical vs digital discussion is completely irrelevant to the problem.
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