An Xbox outage left physical games unplayable, tech lead says Microsoft is working to make sure that never happens again

The recent Xbox outage preventing some players from accessing their physical games should not have happened according to chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet, who says the company is looking into this part of the outages. We had a nice reminder of why the all-digital future is looking bright over the last week, as we saw a PlayStation outage which prevented people from playing the shiny new Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls beta, and then a nice little Xbox outage because you wouldn't want to be left out no matter which console you play on. Obviously none of this was supposed to happen, but while the digital game issues were inevitable, Xbox owners found that some physical games were also rendered unplayable. Van Vliet acknowledged the outage earlier this week, pledging "we'll do better" so that similar future failings "can't ruin your night again." However, he's now spoken about the elephant in the room – that even the physical media wasn't safe. Speaking to The Verge, Van Vliet says "we're looking into reports" and that "disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design." Given that Xbox consoles install the game to your hard drive now regardless of whether it is physical or digital – with the disc itself acting as a way of proving to the console that you do in fact own the game – there is a digital element to it, but Van Vliet says "offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements," and that a fix to prevent this happening is coming in a future update. Granted, this is only going to get worse in an era of Nintendo's Game-Key Cards and the Xbox-released physical copies that are basically the same thing. But at least we get the benefits of an all-digital future like no early retailer price-cuts and the ability for publishers to revoke your game license whenever! Xbox is reportedly testing a feature to digitize physical game collections as PlayStation decides to phase out discs. [/url]

Jul 29, 2026 - 23:00

An Xbox outage left physical games unplayable, tech lead says Microsoft is working to make sure that never happens again

The recent Xbox outage preventing some players from accessing their physical games should not have happened according to chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet, who says the company is looking into this part of the outages.

We had a nice reminder of why the all-digital future is looking bright over the last week, as we saw a PlayStation outage which prevented people from playing the shiny new Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls beta, and then a nice little Xbox outage because you wouldn't want to be left out no matter which console you play on. Obviously none of this was supposed to happen, but while the digital game issues were inevitable, Xbox owners found that some physical games were also rendered unplayable.

Van Vliet acknowledged the outage earlier this week, pledging "we'll do better" so that similar future failings "can't ruin your night again." However, he's now spoken about the elephant in the room – that even the physical media wasn't safe. Speaking to The Verge, Van Vliet says "we're looking into reports" and that "disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design."

Given that Xbox consoles install the game to your hard drive now regardless of whether it is physical or digital – with the disc itself acting as a way of proving to the console that you do in fact own the game – there is a digital element to it, but Van Vliet says "offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements," and that a fix to prevent this happening is coming in a future update.

Granted, this is only going to get worse in an era of Nintendo's Game-Key Cards and the Xbox-released physical copies that are basically the same thing. But at least we get the benefits of an all-digital future like no early retailer price-cuts and the ability for publishers to revoke your game license whenever!

Xbox is reportedly testing a feature to digitize physical game collections as PlayStation decides to phase out discs.

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