Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening prevented players from playing even disc-based games, highlighting how modern physical media ownership differs from older generations—games install to internal drives and require online authentication, meaning network downtime can block access despite owning the physical copy. The incident demonstrates that today's "ownership" of console games is effectively just a license controlled by manufacturers, unlike retro cartridges that work independently of company servers.