Analysis: Xbox and PlayStation Outages - Your All-Digital Future, Folks

Both Xbox and PlayStation this week have suffered severe outages which have called into question what digital ownership means, as we head into a potential "all-digital" future.

Xbox is the latest to suffer a major outage which started early afternoon yesterday Australia time. As a result of the outage, users had issues logging in, couldn't see their full library or play digital copies of games they owned. Perhaps most egregiously, even physical copies of games couldn't be played, as they also required a server-side check to launch.

In a post (and a follow-up reply to a user) on X, Scott Van Vliet, the CTO of Xbox, has explained that the cause of the outage was a Microsoft licensing service which performs checks on a user's account to access content. The CTO also confirmed that the outage was caused by a Microsoft-side licensing service used by many services within the company, meaning Xbox itself did not necessarily have control over the service that fell over.

As at the time of writing, the Xbox Status page is showing that the platform is back online, with no current impacts to users. Van Vliet has committed to a thorough post-incident review of the outage, to understand how the platform can remain resilient to these major dependency outages and reduce impact on the player base.

This comes just days after Sony have suffered an incident of their own: an almost half-day PlayStation Network outage which affected the ability for players to log into their consoles, and play games. It also came on the release of the Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls open beta.

The outage lasted about eight hours before service was restored. No root cause analysis or communication (aside from advisory posts that service was restored) has been published by Sony.

The timing of both these outages doesn't help either company, as we've seen with Sony laying low off the back of their announcement that they will be discontinuing physical media printing from January 2028, and Xbox is reportedly looking at releasing a project that will allow users to gain a digital license of a game from a physical disc.

Both of these initiatives potentially point to the next generation of consoles (that is, the rumoured PlayStation 6 and Xbox's Project Helix) being disc-less consoles, and the events of this week are dress rehearsal for what this all-digital future might look like. But there's still time to make some changes: if consumers are handing over the reins on ownership of their content to the cloud and the corporations that control them, there needs to be some standardisation of norms around access to content to which users are entitled.

PlayStation players are proposing a boycott calling for a blackout of PlayStation Network usage, as well as running a petition that is on its way to almost 400,000 signatures, as community lobbyists call for Sony to backtrack from their position, and commit to physical media.

We've discussed both at length on our podcast (so check it out if you're curious to hear our thoughts in more depth), but these outages are really showcasing what this disc-less, all-digital future will look like. Right now, at least as this Xbox outage has shown, you can't even play games you physically own, much less ones you own digital rights to, whenever you want.

If the naive approach (whether rightly or wrongly) would be to just launch an app or game in offline mode if it exists on the console, and the corporate walled-garden approach would be to check every single time we load, can't we find some sort of happy medium? A rolling 30 or 60 day phone-home license that exists regardless of online connectivity at the time of launching the game.

All of this begs the question of what's to happen to digital content in the years to come. "Preservation" is a term that gets thrown around a little too much nowadays — in many cases incorrectly — but assume a world in which Microsoft decide to call it a day on Xbox: a world that's increasingly looking more and more probable with every decision Asha Sharma seems to be taking in her quest to "reset" the platform, as the platform struggles with cost pressures it is attempting to counter with mass layoffs and console price increases. So what happens to all the games and content you bought?

There are two options: Either we assume the best and hope that Microsoft have an emergency rip-cord which, when pulled, grants us all a magical offline-compatible world, or — more than likely — players simply lose access to everything. Steam, for all of its problems, has a very fair offline mode, all things considered. And it's been working well for years.

I really don't like imagining a world in which we are all, willingly, giving up on rights that we've savoured and enjoyed for years, all for cost-cutting in the name of 'simplicity' or 'speed'.