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Discussion (271 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
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 a horror show this way.
10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)
I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage.
And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
From 2013
PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
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 again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?
And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.
I have 2 words for you: "soon leaving". You may have seen them on Netflix.
And in the US you have the advantage it's generally leaving to go somewhere. In many smaller countries this is not true.
I've never those words in File Explorer.
Microsoft is a joke.
Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.
My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.
Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.
It was pretty great up to the 360, but with the Xbox One everything went to shit. Game consoles were meant to be plug-and-play, today they are more hassle to setup than a PC with Steam (ok, I guess Playstation isn't quite as terrible yet).
Sail the high seas my friend.
but it is so hard to give them money on it
i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time
I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet.
What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
Sorry though, i just reinstalled MCC yesterday to play Halo 1 myself, and lucky me my Microsoft account worked fine
Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.
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.
1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sESfDf0My84
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.
First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.
I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.
How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the original disc in a safe place.
However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.
That's a you problem. I keep mine backed up. GOG even makes it easy to just go grab the latest patch if you downloaded the base game years ago.
>None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Solvable with Wine/Proton (or a Proton fork). If you want to be lazy Heroic launcher makes it easy and even logs into GoG if you don't have them backed up locally. Heroic launcher lets you pick what you want to use to run the game whether it be Proton/Wine/Etc, this even works with Game-Porting-Toolkit on MacOS.
I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.
It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.
I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.
As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.
At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.
So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.
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 one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.
The current Gran Turismo is around 140GB. I think it has a disc, but it'll only have like half the game on it.
Final Fantasy XIV is around 200GB now, and they're talking about dropping PS4 support because drive capacity is going to be too low during the patch cycle for the next expansion.
Also, median US internet is over 100Mb/s now, so downloading a game is faster than installing it from a BluRay reader. And then you don't have to get up and change discs to change games...
Regardless, most console owners buy their games online. Otherwise there would be more games than Funko Pops at GameStop. They also have frequent sales, unlike retailers.
Your point stands, though. Games have grown so huge that downloading them isn't a hassle for most, but disc definitely is or has maxed out. That's not to mention how long it takes to install stuff, especially on PS5!
They know people will buy it regardless of format and price, so not having to spend money to print those pesky little discs is a major net profit.
GTA VI is a cancer slowly metastasising. It will signal to all other game companies that they can charge whatever they want for their pos games and people will just swallow it all down because their favourite nobody with a YouTube channel told them to.
We were already heading for an even darker age in gaming, but mark my words, GTA VI is the torchbearer of an altogether darkerer.
There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.
It’s slowly improving, though.
But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.
E-book DRM is crazy, I agree. I should have included that.
That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.
When I want to support the creator I go and "buy" the thing, but I also go and pirate anyway.
A law isn’t by default just, so when it turns from a safeguard into a manacle it is only logical, fair and correct that we rebel against it.
If buying does not imply ownership, then piracy cannot mean theft.
The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.
You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.
Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.
Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.
Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.
Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58
I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
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)
That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:
https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...
Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:
https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...
To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.
I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.
Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.
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.
I am all for 1-4 and 6. But reselling digital copies is silly.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Do you know about this tool called Ghidra? It makes most programs open source. Not the ones with DRM, though.
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.
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.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.
GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.
That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Some have DRM, of course.
Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.
Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.
I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.
As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.
I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.
HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.
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.
Your kid isn't going to know what it was like to play it back then, throw them the classics and sigh in relief knowing that's he's not being tricked in to corporate exploits such as loot boxes, skins and the likes.
My eight year old nephew loves my old mega drive.
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.
I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).
But the case for physical disk is not (only) about playability, it's mostly about ownership and the fact that you can actually lend it to someone or resell it. It's also about retail, and it's about collectors. About people with a slow or limited connection having access with that much less to download.
Another thing is also that if I have a physical copy, I have the right to a digital copy. So a non-working disc might not always be the end. But if I have a digital copy and they take it off the table, I do not have this right and it is gone forever.
Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it.
Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it.
It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges. If I buy it, it is mine to use as I please and even resell or transfer. If that's not what the transaction is, then don't call it buying or purchasing, call it leasing or licensing.
Require stores and publishers to use language that reflects the nature of the transaction.
And this isn't anything new. Mortal Kombat X came out 11 years ago and the disc had 2 characters and a basic tutorial on it. To get the rest of the game you had to download it.
Your client does not have permission to get URL /comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 from this server.
What does it say?
It's an interesting point, though not 100% accurate due to how there were early video game consoles at the same time as arcade games. Pong clones were common for home play in the early 1970s, and things like the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 date from the mid to late 1970s.
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.
In the end, 1 guy owns everything and we’re all batteries.
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.
Consoles, Apple, Google, etc.
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.
1) The server doesn’t do much other than connect the players, and most of the logic is either client-side or trivial.
2) The server contains a fair bit of game content (such as drop and spawn rates, maybe even NPC dialogue) and the community has done extensive packet captures while the server was online.
3) The server binaries were leaked at some point, and everyone agrees to keep it a secret and pretend they’re doing a clean-room reimplementation from packet captures. They are, but against the leaked server, not the production server.
Having worked on a few of these projects, you’d be surprised at how many of the successful ones are actually #3.
This is problematic because we can’t rely on data breaches for game preservation.
It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)
And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer