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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

#771

Post by wedesoft »

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…

You can run Minecraft Java Edition on GNU/Linux.

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

#772

Post by tonymet »

djray wrote: post #763
tonymet wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’ve tested it , that’s how i found out. If you run your dns it’s easy. Set licensing.xboxlive.com to 0.0.0.0 . The entitlement only lasts a few days. If the online check fails and you’re otherwise online, it gets revoked . Nearly all DRM systems are fail-Closed not fail-open.

"If the online check fails and you’re otherwise online, it gets revoked" That's not being offline ;)

"online check" in this context means online license / entitlement check. There's also a "network online" check that you can disable in the settings.

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

#773

Post by jbstack »

inigyou wrote: post #761
jbstack wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would we measure growth in dollars?

This thread is about taking action to send messages to corporations, and whether said messages make any difference. We would measure growth in dollars, because that's what shareholders (and therefore corporations) care about. If you "send a message" because you aren't happy about some direction the corporation took, and a few years later the shareholders are 3x richer than they were before, do you think they're paying attention to your message? All your message does is tell them that not only were they right, they were so right that even a large scale boycott didn't make a dent in the bottom line. You and I might not like it, but that's the reality.

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

#774

Post by frollogaston »

genewitch wrote: post #750
frollogaston wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how you get a movie that's really quiet for some reason and maybe in some forsaken format

Oh no! amplifiers and VLC/Mplayer!

Yeah so now whatever setup you're running it on needs VLC, which is not a given and also has its own downsides, and you have to mess with the audio for it to still maybe sound bad if they screwed it up irreparably.

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

#776

Post by frollogaston »

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…

New Xboxes come with cupholders for the cans.

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

#777

Post by frollogaston »

inigyou wrote: post #342
hbn wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild cause it was so easy circa ~2010, back before Mojang was purchased. Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.

Mojang was username+password later email+password, following industry trends (username is easily seen in-game so you only have to guess a password which for many people is easier than guessing their email). It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players).…

It's not so much that people didn't set up a Microsoft account, it's that they couldn't. It required verifying the email you originally used to buy the game, which Mojang had never required before, and you had no way to change the email. Lots of accounts were tied to 10 year old emails that had since been shut down. The only other support path was to give them the credit card transaction ID or something, not feasible if you got it as a gift.

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

#778

Post by frollogaston »

avhception wrote: post #183
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…

In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons…

MS Teams login also has some totally broken paths

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

#779

Post by izacus »

cfiggers wrote: post #149
izacus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.

Is that generally caused by Steam, or by the game itself needing an online connection?

It's practically always the game - Steam has offline mode which works fine.

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

#780

Post by altmanaltman »

everdrive wrote: post #755
altmanaltman wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all of this is your subjective view though, some people see and enjoy games as art, peesonal enrichment and even education. We cannot assume everyone shares our exact values.

Thank you. I had previously assumed that everyone did share my exact values, and that I could merely introspect and then successfully understand the perspective of any person on earth.

You're welcome but your comment is proof that you did not and the fact that you resort to sarcasm when getting called out shows you do have a fair bit of ego. Hope it works out for you
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