Xbox’s recent day-long outage has revealed a glaring flaw in players’ crusade to preserve discs. Each physical Xbox title you own requires “entitlements” that can keep you from playing your games. That’s even though Xbox initially claimed an outage “should not” have kept players from playing those titles they ostensibly own.
A few days after PlayStation suffered a similar outage, Xbox went through many hours of awkwardness Monday that left gamers unable to access some digital content or access online multiplayer modes. What proved more concerning is how some gamers reported they seemingly couldn’t play some game discs—even those they had already slotted into the console previously.
After a grueling day where services were offline, Xbox claimed it fixed the problem. In a post on X, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet wrote that the issue was supposedly caused by “a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon,” which started to fail. That also caused disruptions with “many scenarios that require an entitlement check.” That includes digital library ownership.
Earlier today, many players began experiencing issues with sign in, enumerating their game libraries and playing games. The team has worked hard throughout the day to fix the issue, and we’ve restored service as of 2:30 PM PDT. Nonetheless, this is an unacceptable situation, and… https://t.co/3y9TjxzKls
— Scott Van Vliet (@scottvanvliet) July 28, 2026
Why then should an online service disrupt the ability to play game discs? According to Van Vliet in comments provided to The Verge, the service disruptions kept consoles “from correctly using saved entitlements.” Xbox Series S and Series X consoles use those same entitlements for offline mode. The Xbox CTO said they were working out ways to ensure that another outage doesn’t keep players from running their game discs.
You already know by now I don’t have many good things to say about game discs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some benefits. Beyond the ability to sell and buy used games, discs promised you could play games in perpetuity—no matter what happens to Xbox’s servers. The recent Xbox outage may prove that longevity is not guaranteed.
Games on Xbox Series consoles contain encrypted XVC files (as first noted by Tom’s Hardware). Microsoft’s own documentation says that XVC files “make the disc available for offline use.” These files contain licenses for the contained content. In his note about the outage, Van Vliet wrote that the outage “also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems, which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.”
Gizmodo reached out to Xbox about whether these entitlements are covered under Xbox’s software license terms and whether the company can digitally restrict game discs on players’ consoles. We’ll update this post once we hear back.
All consoles have checks installed to keep users from plugging in bootleg physical media or installing software that could jailbreak the device. That certainly hasn’t stopped people from modding consoles like the original Nintendo Switch. Nintendo has sought legal action against groups involved in modding Switch consoles to keep users from installing third-party content or pirating games.
Xbox, just like Sony, may try to end game disc sales with its future console, dubbed Project Helix. Whether or not Xbox grants players licenses for physical content they currently own, it doesn’t help us maintain ownership of our games. If companies are to actually get rid of physical media, then they need to figure out a new way to ensure we own the games we buy, not a mere license.
Read the full article here
