Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the Internet that currently allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Not just possibly, the DMCA makes it a felony to remove or bypass any copy protection measure, even if it doesn't work very well.
Not every jurisdiction has the DMCA, so that’s why I said possibly. It’s definitely illegal in the US.
Every jurisdiction was bullied into adopting this provision as part of every trade deal the US ever makes. Cory Doctorow wrote about it. Look for the keyword "anticircumvention".
Couldn’t find it. I know for a fact it isn’t illegal in my country.
It's coming. https://www.iipa.org/files/uploads/2026/01/BRAZIL-2026-COPYE...
(Search "circumvention")
There’s a huge difference between the US bullying us into making this illegal, and the US throwing a fit in a report suggesting we should do it.
We’ve been on this watchlist before.
There’s no such law being proposed right now.
Removing DRM is all fun and games until single player titles start requiring constant internet access in the future.
Denuvo requires internet access. It's been cracked anyway.
Do you know about this tool called Ghidra? It makes most programs open source. Not the ones with DRM, though.
The next step they want to take is not have you use your own hardware at all and just stream it to you, so you don't even have a copy.
Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?
Not really. They left games broken when they shut down Games for Windows Live.
Xbox kinda, windows no
e-waste is the last of the problems.
Figuratively and literally!