This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.

At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.

Office on the web is a horror show this way.

> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.

From 2013

PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.

I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.

After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.

I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.

This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...

So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.

They ruined Minecraft in the same way. Microsoft login tied, emails, captchas, losing auth, losing purchases because it can’t tie auth to the system.

Microsoft is a joke.

In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.

Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to jump through these hoops.

> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware

It was pretty great up to the 360, but with the Xbox One everything went to shit. Game consoles were meant to be plug-and-play, today they are more hassle to setup than a PC with Steam (ok, I guess Playstation isn't quite as terrible yet).

In Xbox's defence, pretty seamless. I am signed into my xbox account, which is a Microsoft account. When launcing a game all that account auth bullshit is taken care of.

My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.

Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.

Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.

> Since I couldn't do anything else,...

Sail the high seas my friend.

the hardware is good

but it is so hard to give them money on it

i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time

I've lost count of the times my buddy and I wanted to play coop, and I was forced to log in to my ms account for a split screen game. I remember back on the original xbox, and x360, using 'guest' just worked. Forcing people to login for couch coop is asinine.

Nothing infuriates me quite like an additional gaming account inside of a dedicated gaming platform. Running under a Steam/PSN/Xbox account and want to play the game you just bought? Sucks to be you. First create a Ubisoft/Blizzard/indie-studio-with-one-game login so we can better monetize something.

I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.

Silly, you should've paid $60 for the re-re-remake of halo one (which would still need a login i guess...)

Sorry though, i just reinstalled MCC yesterday to play Halo 1 myself, and lucky me my Microsoft account worked fine

And the Steam version is distinctly better to boot. The XBox Store version last I tried just straight up didn't work.

Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.

sounds tough. have you considered showing her an actually good game? just spitballing here

General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.

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.

That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.

>Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. I

It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.

I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.

> I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.

At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.

So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.

Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read.

So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist.

This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.

My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.

There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.

Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.

I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.

Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).

But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.

Pitacy is back in the menu for me.

That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.

When I want to support the creator I go and "buy" the thing, but I also go and pirate anyway.

In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.

The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.

You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.

Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.

Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.

Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.

Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.

Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58

> PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working

That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:

https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...

Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...

To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.

I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way.

I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.

Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.

The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.

Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?

e-waste is the last of the problems.

I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable?

I am all for 1-4 and 6. But reselling digital copies is silly.

Didn't you hear? Buying is not owning, according to these corporate criminals.

Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.

Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.

Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.

Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.

Also there is a vibrant retrogaming community, with lots of games much more interesting than yet another COD or FIFA.

If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.

Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help

You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?

You can say pussy on the internet

Just go two routes at once

Emulation. Tons upon tons of games just sitting there.

Your kid isn't going to know what it was like to play it back then, throw them the classics and sigh in relief knowing that's he's not being tricked in to corporate exploits such as loot boxes, skins and the likes.

My eight year old nephew loves my old mega drive.

They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price.

I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.

For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.

The issue with owning discs now is they tend to not even have the full game on them. They either shipped the discs before the game was done so there's something practically unplayable on the disc, or sometimes it's a demo and you have to download the remaining 95% of the game. The one advantage it has over digital for the time being is you can resell it, assuming they didn't lock a bunch of content behind a one-time-use download code in the box.

And this isn't anything new. Mortal Kombat X came out 11 years ago and the disc had 2 characters and a basic tutorial on it. To get the rest of the game you had to download it.

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Your client does not have permission to get URL /comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 from this server.

What does it say?

It has, but recent events have shown that people need a reminder.

I own everything I've learned. I also own some hardware on which I sometimes deposit this information for later retrieval. I own all of it, keys to nuts.

It's shown again and again and again that nagging representatives doesn't actually work.

But that's all products, and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.

I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards

Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table

Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.

> I totally understand why people just buy physical media.

Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer

You can just pirate movies.