Xbox outage shouldn’t have affected games on disc, Microsoft confirms

After the caller Xbox outage moreover blocked group from playing offline disc-based console games, Microsoft is trying to soothe concerns that you don’t genuinely ain thing nether Xbox’s licence system. In a connection to The Verge, Xbox exertion main Scott Van Vliet says that while beingness crippled discs are taxable to licensing inspections, that shouldn’t person prevented them from moving during this week’s outage, aliases while consoles are offline.

“We’re looking into reports that immoderate players were incapable to entree games utilizing discs arsenic expected during the work interruption. Disc-based entitlement checks should not forestall players from accessing their games and this is by design,” said Van Vliet.

The massive outage started connected Sunday night, and lasted for almost a day. It prevented immoderate console owners from playing games — some beingness and digital, arsenic confirmed by the Xbox position page — alongside logging in, launching apps, aliases uncovering games connected the Xbox store. Xbox confirmed the issues had been resolved connected Monday evening. In an update connected X yesterday, Van Vliet blamed the outage connected an outer licensing service, but didn’t explicate why disc-based games were impacted astatine the time.

Now, Van Vliet tells The Verge that Xbox has identified an rumor that prevented immoderate consoles “from correctly utilizing saved entitlements during the outage,” noting that “Offline mode is besides designed to trust connected those saved entitlements.” A hole to forestall this from happening again will beryllium rolled retired successful an upcoming update.

These “entitlements” are integer authorities licenses that bespeak what contented a personification is entitled to access. As Tom’s Hardware notes, crippled discs for Xbox One and Series S/X consoles see encrypted files pinch the licenses attached, but games pinch afloat disc support “should beryllium disposable for offline use” according to Microsoft’s ain documentation.

The outage occurred arsenic tensions astir the preservation of beingness media are already moving high. Sony is group to cease each accumulation of beingness PlayStation crippled discs by 2028, and Xbox is presently testing a disc-to-digital feature that will let console owners to create integer copies of games they physically own. If Microsoft wants to guarantee group that those discs will still activity aft being digitized, it needs to make judge they’re playable now successful their beingness state.