Following multiple days of outages blocking Xbox users from playing the games they own or indeed buying new ones, Xbox Support now expects "full mitigation" for the issue in a forthcoming update.
"We’ve seen significant improvement to the issue that has prevented some users from purchasing and launching games," Xbox Support assured users in a recent tweet. "We expect full mitigation in the coming days with the rollout of a new update."
Despite this optimistic assessment, many Xbox users, including plenty replying to the announcement from Xbox Support, say they're still unable to play some games at all. This isn't the first time the issue has ostensibly improved, either; Xbox Support said much the same just yesterday, but some players continued to report network issues. It's possible this problem will linger until that larger update arrives, so "the coming days" can't come soon enough.
- The PlayStation Network has been down for 17 hours - and PSN players say even single-player games and disc drives aren't working
- Despite "a rocky couple of years," analyst reckons Xbox's console war is "actually looking pretty bright" - "If you look at the PlayStation sales chart, you see a lot of Microsoft on there"
This issue cropped up late last week, seemingly affecting Europe most severely, and it really flared up over the past two days as folks booted up their consoles to get in some weekend gaming, only to have their plans shut down by failed DRM checks. See, even if you own a game and it doesn't require multiplayer or anything like that, your Xbox console still may not be able to launch it if it can't validate your ownership through Xbox servers.
It's not that Xbox recently changed its DRM policy, but this multi-day outage has put a spotlight on the mandatory DRM checks tied to Xbox games, redoubling criticism of the unpopular system. Xbox has yet to comment on its DRM policy or mention any sort of compensation for the time that Xbox Live subscribers would've lost during the outage.
Xbox is reportedly launching its own line of game streaming devices and dedicated cloud gaming TV apps within a year.
