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

birchtree.me

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

#561
post #259
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.

because you are not buying software. You buying rent

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

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server. Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as oppos…

Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you. GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.

> The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you

I think you missed the "know where to look" part. It's called a Steam emulator, for starters. Note that I speak about this strictly for preservation purposes, as people who raise Steam DRM as an obstacle to preservation have not done their homework.

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

#563
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's all products , and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.

not all products

Not which ones?

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

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No you don't, you just have to plug in this USB drive and copy the files to your hard drive.

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every jurisdiction was bullied into adopting this provision as part of every trade deal the US ever makes. Cory Doctorow wrote about it. Look for the keyword "anticircumvention".

Couldn’t find it. I know for a fact it isn’t illegal in my country.

[deleted]

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

#566

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…

It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft.

It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.

Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s

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

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every jurisdiction was bullied into adopting this provision as part of every trade deal the US ever makes. Cory Doctorow wrote about it. Look for the keyword "anticircumvention".

Couldn’t find it. I know for a fact it isn’t illegal in my country.

It's coming. https://www.iipa.org/files/uploads/2026/01/BRAZIL-2026-COPYE...

(Search "circumvention")

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

#568

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…

To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see.

It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.

But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.

an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.

Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.

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

#569

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…

When I see Microsoft, I run away.

No one is perfect but Microsoft is really efficient at making me lose my mind.

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

#570

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…

I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything…

There are stories of MS bringing in high school students to code core features on Windows 95/98 as a part of their summer intern programming.

And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up.

They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.

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