Games Owned

• None!

Personal History

I was looking for a broken current gen console for quite a while, either PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series. In fact, I was more looking for a PS5, but my partner insisted that an Xbox would been a better choice, since I have a collection of Xbox One games that could work with.

So one day, I stumbled across a broken Xbox Series X for 170 Canadian rupees. Not a bad deal! The previous owner got it evaluated, and got a diagnostic of corrupted SSD. The owner decided to not repair it, as it was becoming quite costly. Well, that was the luck for me, as I knew the Xbox used regular NVMe SSDs, so that could be swapped! Right?…. Right?

Swapping storage, easy right?

Well not quite… You see, the profit is made not by selling consoles, but rather by selling games. In this regard, they are (the games) their most valuable asset, and they most do all they can to prevent piracy. That’s the reason why your OG Xbox had a locked hard drive, to avoid users just dumping games and sharing them. The OG Xbox didn’t managed to keep the pirate at bay for long. Once the locking/unlocking keys were found (one per console), you have access to all files. Fast-forward a few years, Xbox Live is now a requirement for your console, and Microsoft have learned from their mistakes. But not only Microsoft change, but the whole software ownership landscape…

Software ownership

In the 80s, 90s and the 2000s, when you were buying a software (game or not), you had it, it’s yours. You own the disc, and you own the software written in it. It is a static piece of code that have not really evolved after being burned to a disc. You might have received updates through Internet, but delete this software and reinstall it from its original disc, and you go back to its initial state. Nowadays, things are wildly different. Rare are those selling complete softwares on physical media. I say complete, because more often than not, the software on the physical media is either a shell (to store a digital license) or a broken/unfinished copy of the real deal. In both cases, you depend on a store to get the full copy. This copy can be revoked for any reasons; the publisher stop working with the store owner (Steam vs Epic, Xbox Store, …), the music license expired and is not being renewed, your country banning xyz types of games, and so forth and so on. Doesn’t look like ownership to me! In fact, even the digital marketplaces mention this in their term of agreement. You can verify this claim here: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/english/#2

The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.

Go back to the Xbox, please

Okay okay, I tend to get passionate when talking about software ownership! The Xbox was refusing to boot, ‘possibly’ because of a failed SSD. I ordered an SSD that was Xbox-certified on Ebay (possibly coming from one of those external storage solution). It has to be 1Tb, because that was the SSD that was in the console. It arrived, I dug up my old Framework 11th and start cloning the internal drive to the new SSD. One thing I didn’t understood is, why can dd the old drive if it’s “corrupted”. Anyway, it did copy with success (read without errors), and I reassembled the Xbox. The copy is a vital part of the process, because there’s a partition on the storage that contains the required keys to authenticate the motherboard with its storage. This is how Microsoft can ‘lock’ the hardware together. And it worked! I now have a working Xbox Series X, but no games for it. This will be solved eventually!

Okay, but why they do this?

Remember when I said it’s their most valuable asset? Now that they can “prove” that the hardware hasn’t been tampered with, otherwise it would not even boot. But even if it were to boot, the minute your Xbox communicate with their servers, it will report the inconsistent state (some serial number doesn’t match the production data) and, remotely, they could render your Xbox a brick. Now that the hardware side is ‘secured’ what to do with the software? Well that one is easy. Your Xbox, your account get linked together with the game key you bought. If the same game key were to used with another console AND user key, it would indicate a game that has been shared. And that is fairly easy to block remotely.