Jay Peters: Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc

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.

When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain't what it used to be.

I got an analog pocket a couple years ago, and I think it's an awesome product. I was able to insert my Game Boy cartridges from 20 years ago and was able to play them immediately, just like I did back then. Well, on a backlit screen with 10x the pixel density, but still.

The impression I get is that a lot of people have this vision in their head for what physical media still is today, and it simply isn't. Sure, I technically didn't own Golden Sun on the GBA. I technically had a license, but for all intents and purposes, I owned that game. And the evidence is, without Nintendo authorizing anything, I'm able to play it on a new piece of hardware, and it works great. No network downtime is gonna prevent me from doing that.

But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy. This isn't even to mention the fact that when you pop the disc in your drive, you're not playing from the disc. It's installing it to your internal hard drive and is probably installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the game actually work at all.

All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.