Xbox's DRM Outage Reveals The Problems With Digital Ownership

thegamer.com:

Internet outages are a modern part of gaming. Long gone are the days when you could buy a game from a real-life store, go home, pop it in your console and be on your way. Real-life stores are dying, replaced by digital storefronts, while both the PS5 and the Xbox Series offer models with no disc drive to speak of. Even if you do go to a brick and mortar and come home with a plastic box, you'll need to wait hours until the game downloads itself onto your console before you can eventually play it. These are the annoyances of modern gaming, but mostly they represent progress. Except over the weekend, Xbox's servers went down and made a mockery of the idea that we've come so far.

As irritating as the new way of doing things is, there are some obvious upsides to it. Digital storefronts will never sell out, they're a lot more accessible for folks who can't leave the house (or live in areas without major stores), issues in games can now be patched out, and the live-service genre is booming. Of course, for every yin there is a yang. Digital storefronts have less reliable sales than physical retailers and preowned games are a thing of the past, digital stores are inaccessible in areas with poor internet, the existence of patches means games often ship on deadline but badly broken, and the couch co-op genre is dead. The times, they are a-becoming quite different.

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It's probably fair to say there are some things we miss about the good old days, and we've traded away a lot in the name of convenience. But last weekend's fiasco highlights how inconvenient things can be when they go wrong. If you buy an online game, the understanding is that you'll need