First PSN, now Xbox. Digital games have turned back into pumpkins again.
For over seven hours now, players around the world have been unable to log into their accounts, see their libraries, or launch even purchased digital games. Mostly only certain fully offline single-player titles and some disc versions work — and even then, not all of them.
This is already the second major outage in a short period of time. A couple of days ago, we saw almost the same picture with Sony: PSN was down for more than six hours. Now Xbox has picked up the baton.
As someone who has been following the industry for many years, I'll say it straight:
We are becoming increasingly dependent on companies' servers. You buy a game "forever" — and then the server goes down, and you're left staring at an empty library. The disc is in the drive, but the console still demands an online license authorization.
This isn't just a "technical glitch." This is a systemic problem with the entire modern gaming model. As long as Microsoft and Sony continue to bet on full digitalization and constant license verification, days like this will keep happening.
The question is no longer "when will they fix it."
The question is how many more times we'll have to remember that "owning" a digital game is a very conditional concept.
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