On July 27, 2026, Xbox suffered quite possibly the worst outage to its live services in recent memory. The outage lasted nearly a whole day and prevented people from signing into their profiles and launching their downloaded games and apps.
After the debacle was over, Xbox's CTO (Chief Technology Officer), Scott Van Vilet, came online to apologize to Xbox fans and explain how this technical catastrophe happened.
Microsoft has confirmed that the recent Xbox outage shouldn’t have affected games on disc. Xbox discs are subject to "entitlement checks," but they should still be playable offline. A fix to prevent this from happening again will be rolled out soon https://t.co/tV0uAPIxT7July 29, 2026
However, on July 29, 2026, Scott revealed in an interview with The Verge that the damage caused by this outage was worse than most people thought, as he had reports of physical discs of Xbox games not working during this time either.
Scott says, “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.”
He mentions that Xbox's tech engineers discovered that there was an issue that prevented certain Xbox consoles from, and I quote, "correctly using saved entitlements during the outage" and that “Offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements.”
Windows Central's take
Scott says the Xbox's tech support is working on an update to Xbox consoles to prevent this issue from happening again, but it goes to show that investing entirely in a digital-only future for games is not viable in the long run.
Having game discs just be "entitlement" tokens to grant a player digital rights access to a game you download from stores instead of actually having the game on the discs just proves you don't actually own them, and they become glorified paperweights if Xbox Live's servers pull another outage like this again.
Even Microsoft's upcoming disc-to-digital "Positron" program that creates digital copies of physical discs won't matter if online servers fall apart or companies delisting games prevent people from truly owning and playing them.
So how do we get around this? Well, investing in GOG to get access to DRM-free games with dedicated launchers that you can safely download onto your internal or external data storage units without being beholden to online servers to play them sounds like a good idea.
But that's for preserving and owning games on PC; console players don't have the luxury of GOG. All they get right now is either Sony discontinuing game discs for future PlayStation systems or Microsoft blocking people from their Microsoft accounts if they get hacked, cutting off access to thousands of dollars' worth of games.
Honestly, I feel like if Microsoft, Sony, or any other game company wants to keep our good graces without forcing all of us to resort to piracy for true game preservation, they need to go back to basics and have games just be on the discs with no DRM or "entitlement" strings attached.
But what do you think? Do you think we should eliminate "Entitlement" checks and DRM encryption on video games?
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