"Perfect example how of to slowly ruin a game"—Minecraft community outraged as Xbox Live server outage prevented login and play via launcher

As Minecraft is owned by Microsoft, any issue with the company's servers could cause problems in the game. For years, players have complained about how companies force players to remain connected to the server despite the game being locally available on their PC and even in single-player mode. But things seem even worse. Recently, Xbox Live had a server outage, hindering users from launching the game as the launcher could not be used to sign in.

Minecraft player and Reddit user mazemadman12346 posted on the game's subreddit, describing how they wanted to play the SkyFactory 4 mod but couldn't even log in due to the server outage. This is particularly frustrating as the player owns the game and has downloaded it locally.

Not only did they force migration. Now you cant even play the game without connection to microsoft servers byu/mazemadman12346 inMinecraft

Reacting to this dilemma, a user named MindbenderGam1ng commented:

“Perfect example how of to slowly ruin a game.”

Another user, Xgunter, replied to the comment jokingly saying that this is called the "Microsoft special" referring to how Microsoft is known for ruining other game franchises, especially the Halo series.

Comment byu/mazemadman12346 from discussion inMinecraft

ProtesianProjects wrote a lengthy comment giving their take on the whole "requires sign-in" scenario. They said there is no reason for game companies to require players to go online and sign in to play when playing a single-player mode that has been downloaded on their system. They mentioned how companies keep doing this and keep getting away without any repercussions.

Comment byu/mazemadman12346 from discussion inMinecraft

tsheeley sarcastically commented that the original poster missed the fact that they do not own anything with a digital license, which is how most games are bought these days. The original poster replied to them agreeing that players will own nothing and have to be happy with it.

Reddit reacts to the annoying Minecraft issue (Image via Reddit/mazemadman12346)

TartOdd8525 added a bit of sarcasm saying that it’s fantastic when the entire login system has gone down, one cannot play an offline game anymore. iiTheBeast mentioned how they couldn't connect using the Prism Launcher without knowing the problem was from Microsoft’s side.

Many players had the Minecraft sign-in issue (Image via Reddit/mazemadman12346)

oddistrange mentioned how they could not even contact support assistance as the chatbot kept linking to support pages that don't even exist anymore.

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Minecraft online issue

Should Microsoft require players to be online to play Minecraft? (Image via Xbox)

The issue of having to be online to play an offline game runs deeper and could be more problematic in the future. It makes no sense to ask players to connect to the server to play the game while the servers are completely offline, which makes using the Minecraft Launcher impossible. This not only affects the vanilla version but also other modder versions.

Perhaps the solution here could be that Mojang should let players opt out of online services while playing the game so that they do not have to connect to the server to play the game they own.