X gon’ give it to ya…unless “it” is your digitally owned games when the Xbox Network is down. Tens of thousands of users across the Xbox ecosystem were hit by an assortment of errors when Microsoft’s Xbox Network (formerly known as “Xbox Live”) saw a widespread outage throughout this past weekend. The outage had varied effects across the board with some users unable to launch cloud games (via Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service, affectionately called ‘xCloud’ by gamers), others struggling to play games they owned digitally on Xbox consoles, and many not being able to make purchases from the Xbox store.
While the outages were relatively short-lived with most issues cropping up Friday evening and being resolved by Sunday morning, this occurrence also called attention to the bigger issue of Microsoft’s (and other console makers’) digital rights management (DRM) policies currently in place. While many Xbox players were still able to access their digital games by setting their Xbox as their “home” console, others were unable to successfully use this work-around.
Over the past two console generations we’ve seen the video games market shift further and further away from physical discs in favor of digital downloads with a large number of modern game discs still requiring a download to access the full game. While there is still a lot of work to be done in-regards to DRM in gaming, a recent patent by Microsoft seems to be pointing in the right direction. The new patent details a system that would allow for the authentication of an Xbox game via an external disc drive of sorts that would in-turn allow the consumer access to a digital version of the game (particularly big news for owners of Xbox Series S consoles). More about the pending patent can be read here.
This is hopefully just the beginning of a larger conversation to come about ease of access to authenticate game libraries for the millions of gamers who own software digitally.
Image from: Xbox
