After the recent Xbox outage even blocked people from playing offline disc-based console games, Microsoft is trying to soothe concerns that you don’t truly own anything under Xbox’s license system. In a statement to The Verge, Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet says that while physical game discs are subject to licensing inspections, that shouldn’t have prevented them from working during this week’s outage, or while consoles are offline.
“We’re looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption. Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design,” said Van Vliet.
The massive outage started on Sunday night, and lasted for almost a day. It prevented some console owners from playing games — both physical and digital, as confirmed by the Xbox status page — alongside logging in, launching apps, or finding games on the Xbox store. Xbox confirmed the issues had been resolved on Monday evening. In an update on X yesterday, Van Vliet blamed the outage on an external licensing service, but didn’t explain why disc-based games were impacted at the time.
Now, Van Vliet tells The Verge that Xbox has identified an issue that prevented some consoles “from correctly using saved entitlements during the outage,” noting that “Offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements.” A fix to prevent this from happening again will be rolled out in an upcoming update.
These “entitlements” are digital rights licenses that indicate what content a user is entitled to access. As Tom’s Hardware notes, game discs for Xbox One and Series S/X consoles include encrypted files with the licenses attached, but games with full disc support “should be available for offline use” according to Microsoft’s own documentation.
The outage occurred as tensions around the preservation of physical media are already running high. Sony is set to cease all production of physical PlayStation game discs by 2028, and Xbox is currently testing a disc-to-digital feature that will allow console owners to create digital copies of games they physically own. If Microsoft wants to assure people that those discs will still work after being digitized, it needs to make sure they’re playable now in their physical state.