Xbox tech boss says 'unacceptable' outage should not have affected disc games

Xbox's technology chief said an "unacceptable" outage on Monday should not have stopped people from playing their games on physical discs.

"We're looking into reports that some players were unable to access games using discs as expected during the service interruption," Scott Van Vliet said in a statement.

He said the outage, which lasted around 20 hours, was caused by a licensing issue failing to correctly check if a user was allowed to play a game.

It has poured further fuel onto the fire of fears about gaming's potentially digital future - after Xbox rival PlayStation faced an outage of its own on Friday .

"Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design," Van Vliet said, originally reported by The Verge , external .

He said a fix to stop this happening again will be rolled out in an upcoming update.

"I think this highlights how important it is to move towards truly consumers owning their digital games," said one commenter responding to Van Vliet's initial post , external .

"If consoles are going to become digital only, then issues like today cannot lock people out of their stuff."

The issue follows a separate incident on 24 July in which the PlayStation Network also suffered an outage for several hours .

Both incidents have created unease about a so-called digital-only future in games and the questions over game ownership and licensing that come with it.

In June, Rockstar Games announced that physical copies of GTA 6, perhaps one of the most hotly-anticipated games in history, would contain a code for a digital download for the game rather than a disc.

Nintendo has also shifted further towards digital distribution in recent years with the introduction of Game-Key Cards - physical cartridges that act as a key to download a game, rather than containing the game itself.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, Sony announced plans , external to no longer release new PlayStation games on discs from January 2028.

It said while new games would still be able to be bought in shops, they would come with a digital code.

Both announcements have prompted backlash from people worried about a future without physical games.

Stop Killing Games is a consumer rights movement campaigning for publishers to leave online games playable if they end up switching off their servers.