Earlier this week, the Xbox servers went down for an extended period of time. This locked many players out of their digital games, but some even reported being unable to play physical games, too. Now, as the company continues running damage control on the situation, Xbox technology chief Scott Van Vliet says that shouldn’t have happened, and that a future update will prevent any future outages from locking players out of playing their disc-based games.
On July 27, a large chunk of the Xbox online infrastructure stopped working. Many players were unable to log in or access their digital games. Later that night, after issues were resolved and the Xbox servers started working again, Van Vliet posted a lengthy explanation on Twitter about what happened in which he blamed the extended Xbox outage on an external licensing service that began failing, triggering a host of related issues. Van Vliet promised a “full post-incident review” of the outage, but his lengthy explanation didn’t address why physical, disc-based games were reportedly not working on some offline consoles. Now, he’s explained to The Verge that Xbox is aware of the issue with discs and that it shouldn’t have happened.
“We’re looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption,” Van Vliet told The Verge on Wednesday. “Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games, and this is by design.”
Van Vliet confirmed that physical games are subject to licensing checks. But these checks shouldn’t have stopped people from playing physical games during the outage or while an Xbox console is offline. And he claims Xbox has identified the issue that led to some consoles being unable to correctly use “saved entitlements” during the outage. “Offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements,” added the head of Xbox technology.
Xbox will roll out an update in the future that should fix this issue, so during the next outage, players should be able to play disc-based games offline without any issues. Hopefully that happens. If not, well, we won’t need to wait for the all-digital future that Sony is kicking off in 2028 for servers to ruin our video game fun.