Xbox Promises to Investigate Reports of Service Outage Preventing Players From Accessing Physical Games
Xbox is soothing fans’ fears around digital ownership following a system-wide outage that reportedly prevented games on physical discs from being played without an internet connection.
Speaking to The Verge, Xbox’s Chief Technology Officer Scott Van Vliet promised players that the company is investigating these reports, echoing the popular sentiment that, yes, games you own on a physical disc should work offline.
“We’re looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption,” Vliet said. “Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games, and this is by design.”
The outage occurred late on Sunday night, July 26, and lasted well into the next day before finally being resolved late on July 27. The issue prevented players from logging into their Xbox accounts, viewing their game libraries, and even playing games at all. Vliet confirmed that this was due to "a licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon,” vowing to “do better” and calling the disruption an “unacceptable situation.”
“We're running a full post-incident review,” he said in a tweet. “I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again.”
Xbox wasn’t the only major games network that suffered from an outage recently; PlayStation Network also went down for hours on the morning of July 24, preventing players from accessing digital games and launching apps, as well as throwing a major wrench into Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls's record-breaking open beta. Luckily, things were resolved that same day, though PlayStation has not publicly revealed the cause of the issue.
That being said, the PlayStation outage prompted a slew of posts from players hailing the benefits of physical games, which were largely untouched by the network disruption and still playable offline, in the wake of Sony’s decision to eventually end all production of physical game discs by January 2028.
Xbox, on the other hand, is reportedly preparing a method that would allow players to digitize their physical games, allowing them to stick the disc into and giving them a digital license for said game. What’s more, if a player gives or sells a disc to someone else, that digital license then follows its new owner, but the physical version will still work if players choose not to digitize it.
For now, the growing discontent around Sony’s decision to eschew physical discs in favor of a digital-only future continues to ruffle feathers, prompting players to flood the brand’s social media with comments protesting the plans and hoping some way, somehow, it'll change its mind.
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.