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

birchtree.me

541–550 of 796 posts

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

#541

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…

Meanwhile, an illegal pirate version from torrents works flawlessly after installation and double-clicking on the exe file.

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

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?

Unless the party you prove it to is obligated to stay up forever and has service guarantees, yeah

Something something, cryptography.

Come on crypto bros - we need you!

The internet money thing aint gonna work. Look at the pyramid on the back of the dollar. It's esoteric. They will make you disappear and make it look like an accident. Look what happened to Ross.

This isn't even a reply anymore, sorry knollimar

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

#543
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?

You need to be online to prove they currently will let you play it.

I should at least get equity on each login.

After 1000 logins I get the source code.

This is too much like rent, it's not fair.

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

#544
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans accoun…

They will certainly argue, and win, by saying that for legal mumbo jumbo reasons, you only have permission to play it in the exact ways they say you can, and if you already bought the game, but they say you can't play, then it's illegal to play.

Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.

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

#545

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 would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.

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

#546

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…

what a shame; I only played minecraft when it was an alpha, and the .jar file ran just fine on my linux machine at the time.

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

#547

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 would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.

MCC and Xbox Live on Windows have been exactly this jank at least since MCC's Windows release in 2019.

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel. Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windo…

At least it has async I/O, unlike Linux.

not sure if I'm missing something, `select` seems to work just fine on my machine

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

#549

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.

I remember that back in the mid 80s the Application group was not happy about the quality of work so someone circulated a memo about software quality, which I read from Steven Sinorfsky’s blogs. Adding NT on top of it, I’d say they definitely treat software quality a lot more serious than today.

I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.

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

#550

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’…

> An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies That's not the right thing. According to Stallman, that's the opposite of the right thing.

To be fair, I don't think Stallman is against buying or selling software, I think he just feels that the source code should be provided with it (and that you can share it afterwards...)
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