Our digital infrastructure is held by glue
It’s funny how it takes a Cloudflare or AWS outage to remind us en masse just how fragile our online infrastructure is. The gaming world had a couple of moments like this last week, and a stark reminder those were. Let’s get into our main story and contemplate how fleeting our digital “possessions” truly are.
This issue will fill you in on:
PlayStation and Xbox somehow both suffer from separate outages
Image source: my living room
There goes the digital neighborhood
Many Halo fans were more than irked last week when they couldn’t play the newly-released Halo: Campaign Evolved, despite paying an extra $20 to access the game five days early. The cause appeared to be a disruption of Xbox online services, which lasted for a couple of hours. Funnily enough, despite Halo being Xbox’s premier franchise, this issue only affected the Xbox version of the game, and not the PlayStation 5 or PC versions.
But PlayStation was not immune to such troubles either. Just a day later, as the online beta for PlayStation-published Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls was starting up, PlayStation online services went down, thwarting any players from logging onto any of their online games. Problems with Amazon Web Services, which powers much of PlayStation’s network, were reportedly to blame for the outage, which lasted over 6 hours.
And just as you’d think that Xbox was past its predicament, it was hit with an even bigger outage a few days after! This one lasted for about a day, and it prevented many Xbox owners from starting up their digital and physical games. Xbox chief technical officer Scott Van Vliet issued an explanation and an apology, saying that “a licensing service that sits outside of Xbox, but which Xbox depends upon” began to fail, causing problems with sign-ins and “entitlement checks” in what was basically a snowball effect of technical failures. As a result, players couldn’t access their owned games because the system couldn’t determine whether or not they had the digital rights to them.
This is far from the first major outage that both platforms have suffered, and it’s doubtful that they’ll be the last. But as PlayStation (and likely Xbox too) are transitioning to all-digital platforms, these outages have naturally raised alarms.
How’s that all-digital future looking now?
These technical snafus are unpleasant reminders about the pitfalls of digital “ownership” and digital rights management. With many modern games requiring either a persistent online connection or at the very least an occasional online check—even some single-player games with no multiplayer functionality—losing access to your online account, or an outage such as the ones that occurred last week, will prevent you from playing those games.
The fact that Xbox’s major outage resulted in users unable to play some of their disc-based games is particularly egregious. As the industry seemingly phases physical media out, platform holders and publishers also appear to be lessening the functionality of discs by requiring online checks or partial downloads.
In theory, games can (and really should) implement offline modes—even platforms like Steam have such an option. But until such solutions are widely adopted (if they’re even possible with the way these platform infrastructures are built), the situation looks quite dire right now.
Replay: What else happened?
Image source: Xbox Wire
Other news hits
PlayStation fans (and gaming fans in general) are still outraged about Sony’s plans to end support for physical disc games. The policy change, along with several other grievances, has prompted many to back a “blackout” of PlayStation products, calling people to unplug their consoles from August 23 to 30.
Xbox is beginning to add PC backward compatibility support to original Xbox games, starting with four titles. If you own a digital copy of Blinx: The Time Sweeper or Fusion Frenzy, you’re in luck—not only are these and two other games back, but they’re also on Game Pass and with achievement support.
In a move that’s reminiscent of Netflix and other video streaming services, Xbox has begun testing ad-supported game streaming. This feature would let players stream games that they own at no cost (usually, streaming your own games requires a Game Pass subscription), but with ads playing before the game session. These game sessions last for an hour at a time.
After leaving the Xbox family and returning to independence, Double Fine Studios (Brutal Legend, Psychonauts) laid off 23 people, which is about 25% of its entire team.
It’s no surprise that the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV port for Switch 2 would be a massive install for Nintendo’s console, but it’s measuring at a whopping 117.2GB. That’s almost half of the Switch 2’s storage capacity.
If you’re somehow bummed that Kratos isn’t the star of the next God of War, despite him having at least nine of his own games already, then fret not. God of War Laufey (set for a February 16 release date) will immediately be followed by a Kratos-starring game that picks up the story where Laufey ends.
We might be reaching the bottom of the barrel for video game movie adaptations, as Atari is teaming up with Universal and a company called Entertainment 360 (not to be confused with Entertainment 720 from Parks & Recreation) to bring 10 of its IPs to the big screen. Are you ready for movies based on Asteroid, Breakout, Missile Command, Pong, and more? Eh?
Big new game releases include…
You can guess from the title, but Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game (PC, Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S*) is, well, a fighting game in the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. It contains classic characters from both shows—Aang, Zuko, Korra, etc. It got solid reviews, but the launch has a weird asterisk attached, as the Xbox version was delayed by over a month at almost literally the last minute for unclear technical reasons.
One of Nintendo’s freshest franchises got its first spin-off in Splatoon Raiders (Switch 2), a single-player game with optional four-player co-op. Instead of fighting against other players to ink your territory, you’re exploring dungeons, fighting off Salmonids and collecting loot. You can compare this game to Borderlands or Helldivers 2, but it’s distinctly a Splatoon experience. And fans seem to love it, raising the game on Metacritic as one of the highest user-rated games of all time.
The Halo: Campaign Evolved (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S) remake is finally here, reimagining the original game’s single-player campaign (with optional four-player co-op, like the above title). And yes, you read that correctly: this Halo game is on PlayStation as well; a real “cats and dogs living together” kind of moment.
That’s it for this week. See you in August!
Stay fresh!
Chris Compendio
