The Xbox network infrastructure experienced two major outages over the weekend of May 7, during which players were unable to play some of their legitimately acquired games. Enough to revive a latent discontent against DRM.
A breakdown on the network of the manufacturer of your favorite console and your entire video game weekend is depopulated! This is the sad misadventure experienced by Xbox owners on May 7 and 8, 2022, during which Microsoft’s online services were heckled by two major consecutive service interruptions. These failures had first of all expected and altogether perfectly logical consequences: impossibility of joining games online, of making purchases in the Xbox store, of starting a session of cloud gaming, etc. But other disappointments experienced by players were noticeably more extravagant.
Many of them have thus noticed the total impossibility of launching their purchased games for download, including single-player games without any online functionality. Even on a console declared as the user’s “main” console (and therefore supposed to apply a little less constraint on the use of dematerialized content), each launch attempt ended irremediably on a screen confirming the unavailability of the game as long as its owner could not have reconnected to the Xbox network. Even more eccentric, the failure even rendered video or music streaming applications such as Netflix, Disney + or Spotify completely inoperative. And all of this on both Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
the Xbox network outages this weekend highlight the DRM / offline issues Microsoft needs to tackle. Some Xbox owners were left without access to their single player digital games even on their Xbox “home” console. That shouldn’t be happening pic.twitter.com/AfIGxAX5om
—Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 8, 2022
The specter of the 2013 debacle
The situation has inevitably awakened old demons at Microsoft. In the summer of 2013, a few months after the launch of the eighth generation of consoles, the reputation of the Xbox One was seriously damaged when the company’s intention to implement DRM (Digital Right Management, protection systems against piracy of digital content) ultra-restrictive: all games had to undergo a mandatory online authentication every 24 hours, even boxed games, which had to be provided with an activation code single-use online. At the time, the revolt of consumers had pushed the company to backtrack in disaster.
Nine years later, this weekend’s episode shows, however, that ultimately the protection mechanisms now in place are no less strict than what was proposed at the time — they are even more so. . With one small exception: today, disc-based games at least remain unaffected by this kind of downtime. It’s always taken.
A widespread problem in video games
Microsoft’s misadventure comes just a few weeks after a controversy that affected great rival Sony, with whom the recent Gran Turismo 7 imposes a permanent online connection, even for single-player game modes, so when the Polyphony Digital studio was forced, a few days after the game’s release, to put its servers offline for more than 30 hours as a result of a failed update, all purchasers of the game were deprived of real driving simulator.
Beyond the fundamental problem posed by the fact that consumers may find themselves temporarily deprived of content or the use of a machine purchased in a perfectly legal manner, these concerns highlight, as always, the infernal puzzle that DRM will eventually pose for the preservation of video games. When all these online services, artificially made essential to the proper functioning of games or machines, will inevitably be taken offline, what will happen? Can we count on the goodwill of companies to deactivate these DRMs beforehand, and thus save this heritage from falling into a digital black hole? Nothing is less sure.