alt Hacker NewsXbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
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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 a massive profit difference.[1]
On the PC end of things, it’s not as bleak. Services like GoG let you download the standalone installer, DRM free. I try to get any single player games I can from GoG, you should too.
Support the corps that give you ownership. Buy those Blu-rays of your favorite films. Either to support physical media or to ensure you will have it until data degrades.
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 children.
Beyond that I don't really care what the container for the bytes is. If the game isn't sold on a disc I can easily burn my own.
Every publisher can offer all of this today, but they choose not to. And proprietary devices/formats means the free market isn't going to work in the consumer's favor. The only thing that can fix the problem is legislation.
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 still insert any used disc I bought in my ps3 and it will generate a (offline) client-side license for me and let me play and update the game with the disk inside just as a "proof" of still owning it.
If I'm online I'll get patches, else I'll just get served the version on the disc.
(Btw, ps3 also has a print spooler and can natively rip CDs and serve them while acting as a NAS. Or, you can stream games to your psp with remote play. It was truly a "let's cram everything we can inside" era and more like a proper pc with a mediacenter interface)
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
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 problem.
> 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 promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
One consideration I have on every purchase I make is that I own it, like actually own it (with exceptions where necessary, of course). Internet access in something that shouldn't need internet access is a downside. It's a way to mess with the purchase you made.
If my e-reader had a bad battery after years of use, I should be able to replace that battery myself without issue (personal skill allowing). I purchased it. Why wouldn't you be able to? I haven't yet found reason for this in consumer devices, except because they want you to send it in or buy a new one from the manufacturer.
Every time we see something like this, it doesn't get enough eyes or care from those who use these platforms. Sony takes your movies away, Xbox requires you be online, Amazon updating your books automatically without asking you, etc. My favorite that I repeat constantly is all of the BS that BMW has done over the years: heated seats subscription, proprietary bolt heads, ads in the infotainment. If you buy a BMW at this point, I'm sorry, but you had alternatives and I don't feel bad. The scary part is when enough people accept it that everyone else in the industry follows suit and then the outliers are the ones that respect you.
If I purchased a physical disc, I'm not even asking for the source code (which I'd love), I'm just asking that I can run the damn software I bought, but you can't even do that now. Viva open source and right to repair. Make the educated choice when purchasing software and hardware, to your benefit, where appropriate. Of course, the proprietary system is what you need/want sometimes, but I bet most of us don't most of the time.
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, everyone laughs about the "ridiculous" pricing of the Steam machine but once hardware prices come down they will make a second generation that will be an unlocked PC in the same form factor and probably just as powerful as the next-generation Xbox. They might even pass on some of their supply side bargaining power to the end user. Then you will have the choice between a fully locked down Windows PC that only plays Xbox games for 1,000 USD or a fully unlocked Steam machine that plays everything from the Steam, Epic, GOG store, can install regular games and even lets you do work on it, for probably around the same price. Built by a company that has the highest gamer trust of any company we know. Guess this will be a no-brainer for most folks! They have everything to pull this off as well, the brand, the trust, the gamers, the store, the platform, the money, the market power as well as experience with hardware. My take is that they wanted to pull this move already but the AI craze made that impossible so they are using the first-gen Steam machine to learn about the market, but I predict that once prices come down we'll see an announcement, they can time it to match the new console generation by Microsoft and Sony as well. The market should be in a great state by then as well, lots of folks were essentially priced out of the GPU market and NVIDIA won't even release a new generation of gaming cards anytime soon, so all those people that have the buying power but don't know where to put it would flock to a new Steam machine if it can deliver good performance for a reasonable price. And the thing is Valve will have the power to make sure studios optimize games for the Steam machine as well.
Really don't know what Microsoft is doing here, they turned one of the most profitable and beloved gaming platforms into something that seems to be in a death spiral, people are already speculating they might sell the whole thing off eventually.
After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
First, we need to make it illegal to say you are buying something when you are actually renting. Words mean something.
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.
I am so glad i jumped out of the Xbox ecosystem back when I did.
I was such a loyal fan, but the Xbox One made me go from an avid gamer to a casual gamer.
I thought I was done with gaming until I picked up a Nintendo Switch back in 2018 and I rediscovered the joy.
I gave Xbox one more chance with the Series X and that was the final nail in the coffin.
I only play on Switch 2 and Steam OS nowadays.
For most modern software, you are not buying a product, you are buying a window of service. You are entering into an agreement that the software will be supported for a reasonable amount of time. Bugs will be fixed, you might get some additional 'free' content. Games got to the point of being so large and expensive, they crossed this threshold long ago. A single player offline game like The Witcher 3 has had what, about 30 updates? And those games are constantly being dwarfed by seasonal, micro-transation games. The single release game was an endangered species a long time ago.
This is why I only purchase digital games at high discounts. It might be worth $60 to own a piece of physical media that can be played at any time without internet. However, to me the value of a DRM license that can possibly be taken away at any moment is very little. It is ridiculous that they attempt to sell digital games at the same price as a physical game.
In this situation it's completely moral to go pirate the games on a different platform. Illegal, but moral
This is false. You don't need an internet connection to play from disc:
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect...
You can play digital titles, too, as long as your console is set to "Home".
I played Forza Horizon 3 for days without internet a couple of months ago.
TBH can't wait for consoles / console exclusives to die, as long as there is piracy (and steam) pc gaming prices stay reasonable, hardware pricing will eventually sort itself out.
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.
Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
Haha say you want to play co-op with your buddy or girlfriend or something and you just shelled out 59.99 or whatever for the latest microslop product..
You just connect a controller right?
Nah, on ps5, you need to setup a whole ass sony account, and then login to it, and then you need a new microsoft account to link that sony account to, and then maybe, you might be able to play couch co-op.
>But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing.
This is an important point distinction that many people of physical media are missing or being distracted by. All this backlash could be put to better use by supporting game ownership.
You can't play the game you own if the product has to phone home. I'm not getting why people are up in arms about the physical product while DRM is in place that prevents you from playing it.
I don't have a console other than an old PS4 rarely used and I was going to buy a PS5 until the recent news. Now I don't want to buy xbox because of this post. So, what's left? I have a kid and little time and I haven't been a "gamer" since I was a teenager but I want to be able to play maybe 5 or 6 games (co-ops, FIFA, GTA) without downloading anything.
It's even more annoying for me because I often have phases of only playing every 2 months, so it's always true that I would need to update first.
There's a good site for this: https://www.doesitplay.org/
Xbox is the worst about having a dependency on the internet to play your physical media.
"When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain't what it used to be."
But you are mixing Sony and Microsoft here. Sure, both are bad, but many PS disks are totally playable without internet connection.
I was recently surprised to see that AOE2DE captures my microphone on ubuntu even when I toggle the in-game settings to not do so.
Isn't this problem specific to Xbox and PC? I know for sure that first party Nintendo games are playable 100% offline, not sure about Sony?
I'll never buy one of these systems because I want to be able to play my games in 20 or 30 years.
I just bought a Nintendo 64 and a Wii and it's great just being able to play my games with my kids and know that in five years nothing will change.
Buy games on GOG.
It's not strictly true that all physical disks are just license keys - those are marked on the packaging.
Sounds more like a complicated subscription or renting scheme than ownership
I don't understand why anyone thinks that just because they own the disc, they will always be able to play it. It's still full of DRM!
Our only hope are the pirates.
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 artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
I mean yes, same with Steam. Same with PS. GoG is the only DRM free ones.
Physical is mostly a lie once you go past PS2, 3DS etc. It confers a few benefits over digital, like trading and selling, but those are illusory as well, as we see here.
Seems Microslop forgot the #1 rule of selling bits and bytes: buying from you needs to be easier and less painful than opening thepiratebay (and possibly installing an emulator)
Something something layoffs?
Asha Sharma where are you? Keep up your reputation as a great new Xbox CEO.
This stuff is turning me into a physical media pre-2010s truther more and more by the day
Is this really newsworthy? This has been the case for over a decade.
> But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy.
I am pretty certain that there are different legal requirements nonetheless. The author kind of tries to mitigate the danger of big corporations forbidding physical media. Does he think that these corporations have the good of the people in mind? Or are they more interested in milking their cash cows?
Thankfully I am not the target audience anyway. I don't give my money to these greedy corporations to begin with. Them disowning people further here, by killing physical media, would just have been another stepping stone towards a movement away from these big corporations anyway. I don't have time to play games anymore anyway due to old age, but if I would I'd much rather support Indie games - with physical media.
The death of the used games market is still a big deal, even if said used games still depend on the manufacturers' networks and licenses being valid. A digital only world where Sony and Microsoft have the only say about pricing and used games are no longer available is a downgrade for users even from the already-bad status quo
Normalize usage of "have been granted a limited license for" instead of "own." The word "own" implies all manner of things that don't exist for things like Xbox games, Kindle titles, etc.
This is why I don't really understand the outrage with Sony getting rid of physical discs. I guess the argument is you can sell you disc later, but at the end of the day, owning a the disc isn't the same as owning an NES cartridge. Once the servers are down, that's it.
thats why i never bought a game in my life and never intend to... if i want to see how a game works, i could download an emulator and run it via the emulator from a public rom under linux. If I am really interested, i could download a 512GB retropie torrent/magnet and then copy it to a microsd card and run 70k games on a raspberry pi 4...
historically, at least for me, games never worked... i spent more time fixing why they didnt work or debugging them in memory to patch them to get the game to actually run then actually playing a game. This is circa 1983-1987 too so maybe we have progressed from there, but obviously not much.
Every modern media disk since DVD has had revocable DRM . That means you have never owned the disks. (Only Audio CDs and laser disks were owned digital media). With games, a synchronous right’s check is made every time you insert the disk, and if you haven’t played recently, the entire game installation is downloaded. The disk is only used for rights, not for playback. With movies, thankfully the rights check is done offline on your player, but a background online check can revoke your player’s keys, and revoke your entire collection. What’s more, a revocation can ship via another disk. So you can unplug your Blu-ray player for 2 years, insert a new disk, and lose your entire collection.
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, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware