> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
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.
Lock in isn't about physical versus digital. This came up a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138750
Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.
I would hope an old Xbox One disconnected from LAN and WiFi, with a GTA VI DVD inside, could start the game just fine.
Well it can't because how can they check if you're licensed to play the game? Connect to the internet first, then it'll let you start the game.
Ironically, Xbox One support for true offline play was gutted when Xbox gutted a lot of planned Family Sharing support when Sony claimed the Xbox One was not going to allow you to play games offline and made that a marketing campaign with pawn shops like GameStop. (The same campaign that also called in-box Kinect a mistake and complained that the Xbox One was too "media focused" and "not for real game players".)
The resulting early Xbox One pivot removed features that would have been useful when systems were down and replaced them with "offline capable theater" instead. (The same pivot that also killed the Kinect and Xbox One multitasking and host of other useful media features.)
> An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies
That's not the right thing. According to Stallman, that's the opposite of the right thing.
To be fair, I don't think Stallman is against buying or selling software, I think he just feels that the source code should be provided with it (and that you can share it afterwards...)