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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

#421

Post by imhoguy »

goda90 wrote: post #108
cautiouscat wrote: post #9

Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…

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.

I believe there will be still data horders alive who will have a running copy of any game you want. Until the Sun burns the Earth.

Greetings to /r/datahorder bunch :)

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

#422

Post by deaton »

ryandrake wrote: post #391
fouric wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft. I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account. After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number. I will never buy a Microsoft product a…

I tried to simply purchase some Minecraft thinggy for my kid and Microsoft sent me through what seemed to be a 70 step process of logging in, captcha, authenticating, verifying, logging in again, trying to buy, getting blocked, captcha, authenticating again, E-mail verification, online verification, blocked again, contacting support, authenticating, talking to their fraud team, re-logging in, captcha, authenticating,…

As they say, the day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners.

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

#423

Post by amrit3128 »

philistine wrote: post #357
inigyou wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft products are no longer ubiquitous. That's an early 2010s view. In 2026 most clients are running Android, followed by iOS, followed by Mac, and use Google Docs for their office work. Windows is only used on a per-company basis. If your company uses it it uses it, otherwise it doesn't.

You got it mostly right. It's Android, then iOS, then Windows. It is still the number one PC OS, in terms of active users and sales. MacOS is a distant second. Of course in 2026, if you want to make money as a developer selling directly to consumers, your best targets are probably iOS and macOS. Android and Windows are rife with users who'll never buy anything and pirates.

You're confusing number of people with percentages. There's still a large share of people who'll pay to use software on windows or android provided your software is good enough. This wrong impression comes from the fact that many users are from 3rd world countries who can't afford anything else. Steam made their entire business selling stuff on windows. And not just proprietary software. Many blender and godot addons are paid and nobody complains. Apart from developing software, where linux and osx are far ahead, in terms of industry software such a autodesk, solidworks, rhino, flstudio, etc, windows is THE platform you want to target of you are planning on monetization. And I'm saying this as a exclusive linux user of 3 years. You know who won't pay money? Linux users. Not out of lack of it, but mostly because of principle of FOSS software. And yes, I'd rather use a inferior FOSS alternative than a slightly better proprietary one

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

#424

Post by Ajedi32 »

paxys wrote: post #364
throwawayffffas wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable? I am all for 1-4 and 6. But reselling digital copies is silly.

> I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable? I really can't. The only argument I see is "we can't allow it because every customer is a potential thief". What will enabling resale cause? Piracy? Well piracy is happening regardless. People who want to illegally download games can do it today in one click. Instead the piracy excuse is being used to restrict legal resale so you have no option but to pay the pub…

I agree with you in principle, but from a practical perspective if you make piracy that trivial you'll get a lot more pirates, maybe even accidental pirates.

I think as a compromise I'd be okay with some kind of license database (maybe blockchain-based, maybe not) that keeps track of who owns a legal copy of what. People reselling digital copies of copyrighted material would have to transfer ownership of that license to prove they're conducting legit business and not just minting new copies out of thin air.

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

#425

Post by [deleted] »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #411
paxys wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable? I really can't. The only argument I see is "we can't allow it because every customer is a potential thief". What will enabling resale cause? Piracy? Well piracy is happening regardless. People who want to illegally download games can do it today in one click. Instead the piracy excuse is being used to restrict legal resale so you have no option but to pay the pub…

Yeah but there is really no way to enforce a single resale other than extensive DRM measures, which is the whole thing we want to avoid. By allowing resale of digital copies outside of platforms all you get is essentially the complete repeal of intellectual property rights for digital media.

[deleted]

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

#426

Post by realusername »

fryanyway_swe wrote: post #398
inigyou wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what

As someone else stated earlier, the NT kernel is actually great. I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is. The whole ecosyste…

> Steam games from 2009 run just fine.

I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently

> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...

I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.

As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.

It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.

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

#427

Post by bryanlarsen »

keiferski wrote: post #189
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…

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.

counterpoint: in my experience, the low level Windows OS primitives are less buggy than low level MacOS primitives.

They're weird to this unix-head, but generally not as buggy as in MacOS.

But I don't think it contradicts your point. This is just a rare exception to the true general rule.

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

#429

Post by cgriswald »

hkt wrote: post #40

For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc. We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artist…

The services aren’t really that great IMO. They don’t always get you the quality you pay for. They hide their libraries either to keep you engaged with their app or to convince you it’s larger than it is. Most of them charge you even when you don’t use the service that month. But they’re doling out seasons an episode or three at a time to make sure you don’t unsubscribe during any given month. Some have renegged on their previous statements regarding password sharing. You pay for “screens” but those screens have to be for your household only. Their UIs and apps are often broken and are inconsistent between devices. Even when you pay for ad free sometimes there are ads “due to licensing issues” and almost all of them advertise their own shows or apps or podcasts before the content you want to watch.

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

#430

Post by chrisco255 »

verall wrote: post #146
cautiouscat wrote: post #9

Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…

Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read. So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist. This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the…

Games don't need to be 1TB, it's just that companies no longer invest in trying to make games smaller.
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