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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

#651

Post by pezezin »

chrisco255 wrote: post #435
goda90 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.

There are already perfect FPGA emulators of N64 out, why not GameCube.

The MiSTer is already struggling to fit the N64 core, and the GameCube is more than 10 times more complex than the N64. Just the CPU cache and the GPU embedded RAM would be prohibitively expensive to implement on an FPGA, it would require one of the very top of the line FPGAs in the market to even attempt it.

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

#652

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

An offline console would have no access to patches for any game (including the mandatory day one patch that kills off enough remaining bugs to make a modern game playable), downloadable content, or the all-important multiplayer.

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

#653

Post by Gigachad »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #553
Gigachad wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven’t even made a Linux client yet. They are about 13 years behind steam

Do you really need a Linux client? just download the installers. They announced a Linux client, and I honestly can't see a reason I would want to install it...

I don’t want to have to go to a website and download every update manually. I want my saves synced between my PC and steam deck, I want achievements, I want to invite people from my friends list to games.

There’s such a massive list of things the steam client does that makes the experience better.

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

#654

Post by Rury »

r_lee wrote: post #210
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…

Azure is also such a mess. 10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year) I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?

I once saw someone say something like this: "Working in a monopoly mega corp is like working for a 20 person company, connected to 20 other 20 person companies, connected to 20 similar entities containing similar 20 companies, with each group of 20 persons in each competing with each other for investment/budgeting."

Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world.

Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess.

Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.

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

#656

Post by benjaminoakes »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #503

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.

> They give you a link to download a DRM free copy

Please say more

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

#657

Post by vanderZwan »

gameshot911 wrote: post #638
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…

If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to: If I produce a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to... dictate all the terms upon which I agree to sell it. You have the right to agree to those terms, or not.

So where do either of you lie on the "human rights vs property rights" spectrum? Because that's the real discussion to be had here. To quote Cory Doctorow:

> But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

> "Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.

> That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-...

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

#658

Post by tombert »

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…

I feel like what Microsoft is best at is making something and convincing everyone to use it before anyone has been able to thoroughly check how terrible it is, and by the time people have pointed it out, it’s too late and people act like it’s impossible to change.

Windows 11 has been a shitshow, but Windows has basically been a shitshow since at least Vista, and maybe XP.

People defend XP, but let’s not forget that Windows Update was still broken shitware on XP. The “system repair tools” have never worked for anyone ever in history. System Restore barely-if-ever worked.

Office is a shitshow. Teams is a shitshow. Their entire web presence is a shitshow. Everything that MS does is a shitshow.

And despite all of this, I am still stuck playing IT boy with my parents’ computers because they refuse to use an operating system that isn’t complete dogshit.

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

#659

Post by [deleted] »

epistasis wrote: post #302
keiferski wrote: post #189

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…

[deleted]

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

#660

Post by tombert »

pipes wrote: post #532
thewebguyd wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I am skeptical of the “backwards compatibility” claims. Often playing older Windows games is easier and more reliable on Linux with Wine/Proton than on Windows 11.
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