Xbox's technology chief said an "unacceptable" outage on Monday should not have stopped people from playing their games on physical discs. The service interruption lasted around 20 hours and, according to Scott Van Vliet, was caused by a licensing issue that failed to correctly check whether a user was allowed to play a game.
"We're looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption," Scott Van Vliet said in a statement. He added that the company is working on a fix to prevent it from happening again.
"Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design," Van Vliet said, originally reported by The Verge, external.
The outage has added to concerns about gaming's potentially digital future, especially after Xbox rival PlayStation faced an outage of its own on Friday.
A fix to stop this happening again will be rolled out in an upcoming update, Van Vliet said.
"I think this highlights how important it is to move towards truly consumers owning their digital games," said one commenter responding to Van Vliet's initial post, external.
"If consoles are going to become digital only, then issues like today cannot lock people out of their stuff."
Gaming's digital-only future
The issue follows a separate incident on 24 July in which the PlayStation Network also suffered an outage for several hours. Both incidents have created unease about a so-called digital-only future in games and the questions over game ownership and licensing that come with it.
In June, Rockstar Games announced that physical copies of GTA 6, perhaps one of the most hotly-anticipated games in history, would contain a code for a digital download for the game rather than a disc. Nintendo has also shifted further towards digital distribution in recent years with the introduction of Game-Key Cards - physical cartridges that act as a key to download a game, rather than containing the game itself.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Sony announced plans, external to no longer release new PlayStation games on discs from January 2028. It said while new games would still be able to be bought in shops, they would come with a digital code.
Both announcements have prompted backlash from people worried about a future without physical games.
Stop Killing Games is a consumer rights movement campaigning for publishers to leave online games playable if they end up switching off their servers.
"The problem is the industry has a very poor reputation of disabling games once they end support," said Scott Ross, co-founder of consumer rights group Stop Killing Games, following Rockstar's announcement.
"The trust from customers for many large publishers just isn't there.
"I don't think the lack of a disc is the problem in itself, but rather it can be a symptom of a larger, very consumer-hostile practice."
Jez Corden, executive editor of the website Windows Central, said Sony's decision to stop selling physical games had "put digital rights under a microscope". He said the statement on the Xbox outage suggested the firm was "sensitive of the discussions around digital rights and disc-based games right now".
Digital sales now account for the vast majority of game revenue - but the recent spate of outages have lead some to hope games companies may begin to rethink their strategy.
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