Xbox’s July outage re-sparks fears over digital game ‘ownership’

The Xbox outage might have been resolved, but some gamers still have some lingering worries about the future of gaming.

Yesterday, Xbox Live went through a long outage that left many users unable to sign into the online services and even play some online games. The investigation into the matter ended up taking longer than expected, getting resolved late last night. While it’s great that Xbox players were able to finally get back online, a recent Reddit thread raised some concerns about having to constantly be online to play games nowadays.

In r/Gaming, the question “Isn’t this XBox sign-in outage just another reason we should be concerned about not “owning” the media we buy?” came up. Users responded with similar claims that an outage like this is one of the downsides of an all-digital world where the ability to play games requires you to always be connected to something, even if they are single-player games and/or are played on physical discs. It also served as a grim reminder that in today’s gaming landscape, gamers don’t actually have true “ownership” of their games.

This is an issue that will likely get worse as companies rely more on online subscriptions and services than traditional ways to play games. Some gamers are already bringing light to these issues with initiatives such as the Stop Killing Games movement that hopes to stop companies from delisting and shutting down servers to render some games unplayable.

Many users in the Reddit thread gave their own temporary solutions to the problem, such as only buying games that promise offline play, but it will probably take a lot more than that to get the attention of these companies