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

Jay Peters: Xbox’s immense outage moreover blocked games connected disc

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t conscionable caused issues for group trying to play integer games — it blocked group from playing their disc-based games, too.

When Sony announced that they were discontinuing beingness discs for PlayStation, I was little outraged than many. The logic I felt this measurement wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I deliberation it came from an knowing that beingness media ain't what it utilized to be.

I sewage an analog pouch a mates years ago, and I deliberation it's an awesome product. I was capable to insert my Game Boy cartridges from 20 years agone and was capable to play them immediately, conscionable for illustration I did backmost then. Well, connected a backlit surface pinch 10x the pixel density, but still.

The belief I get is that a batch of group person this imagination successful their caput for what beingness media still is today, and it simply isn't. Sure, I technically didn't ain Golden Sun connected the GBA. I technically had a license, but for each intents and purposes, I owned that game. And the grounds is, without Nintendo authorizing anything, I'm capable to play it connected a caller portion of hardware, and it useful great. No web downtime is gonna forestall maine from doing that.

But owning a crippled connected a disc coming isn't really the aforesaid thing. It's still conscionable a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo tin either intentionally or, successful this case, unintentionally forestall you from playing that game, moreover if you ain the beingness copy. This isn't moreover to mention the truth that erstwhile you popular the disc successful your drive, you're not playing from the disc. It's installing it to your soul difficult thrust and is astir apt installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the crippled really activity astatine all.

All I'm saying is it's each integer connected the PC broadside of things, and has been for ages, but we person intends of maintaining entree to the games we emotion complete here, and it's 1 of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for rather a while now.