Xbox Online DRM has come under fire after major outages

Xbox has come under fire for several major Xbox network outages that left many unable to play games over the weekend, including some of the singles they owned.

The Xbox Network took a stand on Friday night here in the UK, with gamers reporting that they were unable to purchase or play games or play games with Xbox Cloud Gaming. Then service was restored on Saturday, before descending again later that day. According to the Xbox Status support page, all services are now working without errors, even though they appear Some users Still having problems.

Xbox players cannot play purchased digital games offline

Since users are unable to play some purchased games during these outages, Xbox has come under fire for its online digital rights management (DRM) policy. Kinda Funny Xcast and Gamertag radio host Paris Lilly has criticized Xbox’s DRM policy on Twitter (Thanks, VGC) They called for change. “The Xbox outages have made it clear that something needs to change with their DRM policy, and games downloaded to my console have to have a window to be offline and playable without checking in,” Lilly said. “Hopefully we can get some clarity and a solution to avoid this problem again.”

According to Windows Central’s jeez cordonThe problem may lie with many third-party publishers requiring Xbox to perform DRM checks, even with single-player games that are completely offline. However, the Twitter Account Does It Play? , which “tests commercial versions to make sure they work for free on the Internet” I suggested It was only the Xbox issue and that the PlayStation and Switch didn’t require online DRM accesses for games to work offline. “If tomorrow’s PlayStation servers go down permanently, almost every single player game you own will work offline (provided the console is working and the account is linked). A small subset of titles won’t,” the account said. “Xbox needs to fix their DRM issues. A manual wave won’t help.”

Some found that the issue was due to their Xbox console not being set as a “home” console, although others still had issues despite changing this later or setting it as a home console in first place.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to this, and if we get a detailed explanation of this issue. Last year, Xbox president Phil Spencer said he hopes the industry can do more to help preserve games. This latest disaster seems to fly in the face of it.

How did you handle the Xbox network outage over the weekend? Have you not been able to play any digital games you have purchased? Let us know in the comments.