Microsoft was not in a good position over the weekend, as some gamers couldn’t even get their games to start.

On Friday and Saturday (depending on the time zone), there was a 12-hour server outage, which is no short period. Microsoft’s customer support team acknowledged at 10:46 PM CET on Friday that some of their users were unable to buy games, launch them or play them from the cloud. The first factor to be fixed was game purchases, which the Redmond-based company repaired in a few hours, but the other two factors took nearly half a day to work correctly.

Even yesterday afternoon, at 1:15 PM, there were still problems. Their customer support team posted on Twitter that certain media streaming apps (such as Netflix and Disney+) were still problematic, so it must be a painful outage if it’s not that easy to restart everything smoothly…

This outage shows that online DRM has its drawbacks (it also applies on PC, not only to live service games that require servers but also to Denuvo DRM-laden titles!), as you can lose access to a game even if you bought it. ModernVintageGamer, a YouTuber who works at Nightdive Studios, called online DRM simply cancer.

According to Ben Turpin, a journalist, “This is why Microsoft needs to get off their high horse and remove DRM. I’m sure this violates consumer rights. What if Xbox Live is down for a week due to a major hack? Then no one can play their digital games. I have so much respect for Microsoft, but DRM sucks.” This whole topic also brings up the issue of game preservation and archiving: for example, F1 2016-2017-2018 for PC from Codemasters. These three games are no longer on Steam, having been removed by Electronic Arts. All three of them still have Denuvo (why not remove them after a few years…?!). They are that interested in archiving (not).

The downside of going online…

Source: VGC