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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

#591
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…

Happened to many people. The system claims it's because of some suspicious activity but everybody who gave in to this blackmail and submitted personal details said that after logging in there was no notice of anything suspicious. since this is a game it's probably mostly kids whose identifying information Microsoft is hunting for. I can't believe it's legal and the company was not sued yet me I just pirate it now, ne…

My friends and I play on a private server that I run in offline mode because some of us got locked out of our accounts. Didn't matter having to give (fake) personal info, but that didn't even get you into the account cause of the broken email verification.

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

#592
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…

"Give us your phone number or we will hold your minecraft account ransom"

You don't get in even with the phone number

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

#593
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…

It is basically about physical vs digital because these ownership problems are tied to the copy being digital, including on Steam. In theory you could have a digital copy that guarantees transferability like with Nintendo, but even then it'd be a promise they have to keep along with more technical complexity that could break it.

Edit: Or there are DRM-free copies, but there are good reasons that's only ever done for very old games like on GOG.

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

#594

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…

> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

Whoa! Now hang on a minute. That's not fair. They've only been developing software for 51 years! It takes time to get good at these things, you know?

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

#595
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Destiny 1 partially ran on consoles, though. It was mostly p2p: https://gist.github.com/nessus42/55c1260d88e2028689de0c49381...

Yes, but never in the absence of the Bungie servers. It did have a full sequential single player campaign, but parts of the single player campaign took place in shared instances where the user could see other players running around the map. The single player campaign could also be played cooperatively with other players in the same 'fireteam' if desired, but that was optional.

Sure, but SPC still took place in the same shared world. It wasn't like there is a single-player vs multiplayer in CoD or BF. The only way to make those campaigns work offline is to remove all drops from them and remove co-op pieces that aren't optional. Doing a strike and joining right at the end of it, missing the entire story of that strike, was like a mandatory experience for D2.

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

#596

The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber. No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles. In 2026 I can stil…

I remember PS3 Call of Duty online play being very unreliable compared to Xbox Live. It didn't use relay servers, so the host needed port-forwarding or upnp, which is a dubious situation to be in.

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

#597
post #7

> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now. It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague pro…

[dead]

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

#598

People focus too much on discs and cartridges, but too little on licensing and drm. The disc is meaningless if you cannot run it after drm servers died. Also, very often the game on the disc is unplayable because of lack of day-1 patch. Meanwhile you can burn games you bought from GOG on a cd and play it 10 years later without internet connection. So the physical vs digital discussion is completely irrelevant to the…

It's relevant because most game publishers won't want to hand out a DRM-free copy. So it's either a digital one phoning home or a physical disc/cartridge that they assume most people won't reverse-engineer. GOG is an exception to the rule and doesn't have a wide game selection.

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

#599

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…

For games that require online services, this will always be an inherent issue. But for games that don't, I'm betting on emulation continuing to save the day. When the PS3 was released with its complex/novel architecture, it seemed like an emulator was highly unlikely, but look at how good RPCS3 is now. On the Microsoft side, they've been incredibly good about first-party backwards compatibility. I bought most of my X…

>look at how good RPCS3 is now

My understanding is that it's nowhere near the state of, say, PSX emulators around the turn of the century. There's still swaths of late 2000s and 2010s releases that are unplayable without the original hardware.

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

#600

I encourage folks with a PlayStation 5 (or 4) to participate in the blackout by unplugging their console for the week of August 23 at 7:00 PM your local time and run to August 31 at 7:00 PM your local time. Hopefully that helps send a message. We should irrevocably own our games, not rent a revokable license. And we should have price competition from multiple store fronts.

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