Microsoft’s DRM implementation has been a major issue for gamers who own Xbox consoles. While the tech prevents users from taking advantage of multiple consoles running the same licensed game at the same time, it also prevents players from booting up their games without an online connection. Since Friday, 6 May users have been struggling with online connection issues with Xbox Live and four days later, they are still unable to launch games.
While the issue isn’t as widespread as a full server outage, it is currently affecting a lot of players. To make matters worse, Microsoft took what felt like forever to respond to the problem before claiming it was fixed when it wasn’t. It seems the issue is much bigger than we thought as the company promises a fix in the “coming days”.
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The issue has seen hundreds of gamers being locked out of launching and booting up purchased games. This has been happening now for almost five days. While Microsoft says the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles are offline devices, Does it Play? (an account used to test commercial games for online requirements) proved otherwise. In fact, the majority of Xbox games require an online connection before they boot up.
This is regardless of your console being marked as your “Home Console” or not. Games simply won’t boot up without an active internet connection. The issue now is that even though users are connected to the internet, Microsoft’s server problems claim they are offline and these games fail to boot up.
Does it Play? confirmed the news by testing multiple games saying that PlayStation and Nintendo do not use this forceful DRM at all. They say:
“If the PlayStation servers go down tomorrow permanently, every single player game you own will work offline almost permanently (provided console is working and account was linked). There are a tiny subset of titles that will not.
Xbox NEEDS to fix their DRM problems. Hand waving won’t help… Nobody wins, especially Xbox fans when ALL the catalog eventually becomes inaccessible
We’ve seen significant improvement to the issue that has prevented some users from purchasing and launching games. We expect full mitigation in the coming days with the roll out of a new update.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) May 9, 2022
