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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

#691

Post by cyberax »

pishpash wrote: post #381
inigyou wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what

Here's a list of MS software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?

Internet Explorer was _better_ than Netscape in the 90-s and the early 2000-s.

Microsoft Office (and especially Excel) was just about perfect around 2003, and only degraded since then. I would argue that Office 2003 is still the best office to this day.

DirectX was a godsend for game developers (up until around 2020 when MS stopped caring about anything).

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

#692

Post by jbstack »

inigyou wrote: post #604
asdff wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What like le reddit blackout?

"le reddit blackout" was the beginning of the end for reddit, so idk what you're trying to imply here.

Really? In August 2021 Reddit had a funding valuation at ~$10bn. It announced the API changes in April 2023. The blackout started in June 2023. It launched its IPO at $34 per share in March 2024. It's now trading at $160, with a market cap of ~$30.7bn. In other words, it's tripled in value over a 5 year period during which the blackout happened. That's a phenomenal rate of growth.

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

#693

Post by GJim »

HDBaseT wrote: post #627
david_allison wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse: there's unpatched RCEs for Modern Warfare II: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-10718

Valve needs to grow a bit of a spine here. The Call of Duty series is one of the worst offenders, effectively every game outside of the last 2 years has so many bad CVEs' and remote code exploits that even opening them on your PC is unsafe. Playing the official matchmaking on even something as recent as Black Ops 3 will have your computer compromised in minutes. Yet they are still on the store front, they never go on…

I'm not necessarily doubting what you say, however please could you provide us with a citation? The allegations you make appear quite serious.

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

#694

Post by mzajc »

grumbel wrote: post #132
glimshe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.

DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all. If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up try…

This is nonsense; GOG has a very simple API to list and download games you own, and all you have to do is run a downloader script (many are available online, including mine) in a cron job to keep the latest versions of games on your disk.

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

#695

Post by jogu »

This article touches on why I think a lot of disdain for Nintendo's game key cards is misguided. They're functionally equivalent of what Xbox/Sony consoles have been doing for the past 2 generations but at least provide clear labels and marketing that the game won't function without online activation / downloads.

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

#696

Post by jogu »

frollogaston wrote: post #629
ThePhysicist wrote: post #471

I think Valve is just going to kill Xbox in a couple of years. Basically Microsoft is planning to make the next Xbox an "ordinary" Windows computer with a different UI as well as vendor-locked hard- & software. So essentially you'll get a (maybe) slightly discounted small form-factor PC for the living room that only runs games from the Xbox store, which will be more expensive than the same games on Steam. Now, everyo…

The Steam machine costs like double an Xbox

A 1 TB Xbox is now $800 USD, where Microsoft is allegedly eating a $150 loss on each sale. Console pricing just hasn't reflected the realities yet or are eating the loss (to be made up via software sales). If their next console is open, they'll be in the same boat as Valve and won't be able to sell the console at a loss as there's no guarantee software sales will follow.

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

#697

Post by tormeh »

annzabelle wrote: post #635
acaloiar wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year. Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrati…

I moved to New Zealand from the US recently, and the tech industry here is mostly on .NET and Azure. My coworkers keep looking at me like I'm a moron because I've always deployed to AWS via Jenkins and don't know their weird homebrew system to deploy things to our on prem windows servers.

I think all tertiary software job markets are like this. Full of bosses and coders who don't even know how bad their practices are.

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

#698

Post by tormeh »

acaloiar wrote: post #581
brightball wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically my experience. I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family. I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options. Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20…

If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year. Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrati…

An OS has massive network effects. You get Windows because you want to run software compiled for Windows. The OS itself is a necessary inconvenience.

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

#699

Post by TrueSlacker0 »

tsylba wrote: post #677
epistasis wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait, you can't play Minecraft on GNU/Linux anymore? I've bought the things for 10 bucks when it was still an alpha on TIGForum, it's been decade since I played the game but it never required us to be on a proprietary platform then. That'd be a bummer.

It still works on linux. Both server and client.
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