First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.
I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.
Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.
I fully disagree with this statement, it equates very unequal scenarios.
> Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.
Disks can't be locked-in - the OEM console that runs them can. Platform emulators can't be locked-in: MAME, Dolphin, RPCS3, Eden, etc offer user freedom, and all depend on access to the game's physical media in order to dump, rip, or play directly off of.
You need an exploit and/or decryption key to archive a game on a locked-down, downloads-only disk-free console. Something valuable is lost when there is a forced physical to digital transition.
When represented on a quadrant wirh physical/digital on one axis and locked-down/open on the other, the locked-down + disk quadrant can be nullified by user-controlled emulators. Until recently, this quadrant had a lot of games, while digital+open is nearly empty, save for GoG, old non-steam, Humble Bundle games, quirky Indie games, and old game DVDs on a shelf.
The resulting early Xbox One pivot removed features that would have been useful when systems were down and replaced them with "offline capable theater" instead. (The same pivot that also killed the Kinect and Xbox One multitasking and host of other useful media features.)
GTA VI is not being released on the Xbox One. Game discs aren't DVDs and haven't been for well over a decade, they use Bluray discs, which won't even matter since GTA VI isn't shipping with a physical disc, only a code.
You need internet to access this product. You need updated system firmware.
That's not the right thing. According to Stallman, that's the opposite of the right thing.
Under the GPL you could have bought your copy of the game knowing that you could retrieve the source code, make the changes necessary for the software to function and distribute the changes under the same license. Or just retrieve someone else's changes to that end.
Might seem very impractical for a commercial game, but Id software released the source code of a bunch of their engines within a few years of the initial release of the games based on them, meaning you would only need to supply the still-proprietary game data to have a functional game. As a result there are still rather recent commercial releases based on free software derivatives of these engines.
How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...
If a platform tries to take advantage of you, it's worth trying to change the platform. If you have no chance of changing the platform, you should cut the platform out of your life. I'm not saying "oh, just don't buy new video games" I'm saying "you may be faced with a choice where you either acquiesce to Microsoft's business model, or you do not buy new video games." If you were really faced with that choice, what would you do?
"But the bait looks so nice!"
Yes. Yes it does.
Yes, you may have to sacrifice and not get some things you want in the moment. Our capitalistic overlords have demonstrated that they will absolutely abuse you to the maximum extent you permit. If you are willing to give everything to play GTA 6, then they will take it.
The compensation is that there is already more than you could possibly do available in spaces where they are not locking you in a box, or you can break out of the box with minimal moral quandaries and technical difficulties.
This isn't really news. Control your desires or they will control you is not new wisdom. Though the modern ability to exploit other's inability to control their desires certainly does have some new twists on it.
"Each man's master is the person who has the authority over what the man wishes or does not wish, so as to secure it, or take it away. Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish for anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others; or else he is necessarily a slave." - The Encheridion Of Epictetus, second century AD
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ADiscourses_of_Epictetu...
I agree, the right action as a consumer is boycotting rent seeking products and pestering politicians. But it does feel hopeless as too few of our politicians seem to care about these sorts of seemingly minor grievances.
I personally disagree that you must control your desires or get controlled by them. You can wish to change the world instead of being like "NO NOT THE BOX. MAMA DIDNT RAISE NO SLAVE" also.
That's what collection is for.
Or make your own games or play ones made by indies that you can actually own.
If the death of physical media locks me into playing whatver is forcefed to me by AAA studios, I will reject that bargain and engage in the decades of backlogged media I haven't gotten to yet. If every studio stopped making music, movies, and TV today, there is still so much I haven't seen/listened to/played that it won't even move the needle.
Lastly, going against the grain here, but GTA 6 looks about as unappealing as it possibly could. I don't want to play 2026 Simulator, no matter how good it looks. Really it just looks like parody version of current politics and society and that's what games are helping me escape from.
Consumers are actually pushing back. Consumers show that even an 35 years old console and 90€ games can sell easily if it comes in a big beautiful box and with the assurance you'll be able to play in 15 years.
If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the original disc in a safe place.
We've all heard this. But let's not forget that recently, some important representative of Microsoft went and told some important politicians, that buying is stealing.
Yes. She said that buying is stealing. Buying the game and playing multiplayer on your own server is stealing, more specifically.
So if buying is stealing, why not pirate?
Assuming you’re not redistributing, of course, which is another thing entirely.
> digital copies sourced from the high seas
Selling machines that require subscriptions to operate doesn't change the settled law about having backups of things you bought.
However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.
> As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats.
…or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does.
https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/08/06/032440
Mind you, odds are their anti-tamper/DRM is a different case.
No reason to play by the rules if decency is not in the picture anymore.
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.