I was pretty critical of Jez's tweets due to him seemingly dismissing some issues, but I'm glad he reached out to some people at Xbox to get some clarification. I'll reference the interesting tidbits.
Seems like you can't just simply download a game digitally, disconnect, and have it work. You need to launch the game at least once to get your offline license. This could explain MVG unable to open Ori and the Blind Forest in his notorious video. I thought this was the same for other systems, but I might be mistaken. I would like to see Xbox maybe grant you the offline license while you download the game to clear up any confusion.
EDIT: This seems to be how Steam works.
Like some people have speculated, the reason some people couldn't play games was due to a system trying to connect to the server bug. Glad to see that they're looking to release a patch.
This weekend's Xbox outage put Microsoft's DRM back in the spotlight
Lengthy disruption across the weekend raised the specter of Xbox One's 2013 DRM.
www.windowscentral.com
Seems like you can't just simply download a game digitally, disconnect, and have it work. You need to launch the game at least once to get your offline license. This could explain MVG unable to open Ori and the Blind Forest in his notorious video. I thought this was the same for other systems, but I might be mistaken. I would like to see Xbox maybe grant you the offline license while you download the game to clear up any confusion.
EDIT: This seems to be how Steam works.
In a conversation with Ashley McKissick, Xbox CVP for Gaming Experiences and Platforms, I discovered a little bit more about how game licenses work on the console. In order to receive an offline license for a digital game (which lasts forever on Xbox consoles once downloaded), you have to have launched the game at least once. In the case of disc-based games, McKissick confirmed that these pull the license from the disc itself. However, some users may have found that running backward-compatible Xbox One games on an Xbox Series X|S may have still failed to launch from the disc during this outage, since they need to pull down some compatibility settings on the first load.
Like some people have speculated, the reason some people couldn't play games was due to a system trying to connect to the server bug. Glad to see that they're looking to release a patch.
Indeed, any scenario where offline games on your home console, digital or disc-based, could ever become inaccessible owing to DRM, isn't acceptable in my view. And indeed, it was confirmed to me that the inability to play offline games on your home console was not intentional, and merely the result of the server problems that Microsoft is working to patch.
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