"You'll still be able to access your content"
Yeah, until they release a new version of the launcher, or underlying framework, which prevents the old app to run, locking people out of the content they paid for.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
399 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
73190 readers
5775 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If purchasing isn’t owning, piracy isn’t theft.
I remember when they killed their Games For Windows store and the games I'd bought on there just went poof. Never trust Microsoft to keep a digital storefront around, they'll delete it all at the drop of a hat.
Like with Bitcoin, not your keys not your coin. If you don't hold it you don't own it.
Never trust Microsoft
If you think about it: Microsoft owns XBox, that has been one of the three major consoles for decades now. They own Windows, the world's most popular operating system. They own Edge, one of the major browsers. And they still failed to create a movie and TV store and shut down their music streaming service. Which is totally insane - that shit was bundled with fucking windows and Xbox and they still made it suck so hard that it failed
Microsoft isn't popular by choice. They can't force people into shitty ecosystems if they have no reason to choose it to begin with. Microsoft was the only choice for decades, and will go down as the golden example of business monopoly.
Apple, amazon, google, all have their claws deeper in people because they make products people choose to use. They actually like the products, so the companies can slowly enshittify them and keep their users.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Don’t forget that they didn’t succeed on mobile phones either. Despite it was very fine OS and devices were good too.
Good except for the critical features they didn't add. Like when the iPhone didn't have copy-paste, but on a Microsoft phone, way later.
I think it’s more that consumers didn’t know what the fuck it was.
Which is totally a failure of Microsoft. People have their Xbox connected to their TV. They have an account and they have their payment information maintained there. And Microsoft can't make the simple proposal of "Hey, this device you have connected to your TV and where you are playing games on, you can also use it to watch movies and series"
PS3 was a 1080p capable device connected to our (new in 2007) 1080p living room TV, the only 1080p device for almost a year. It played BluRay discs - they had the opportunity to cooperate with Netflix and other content providers like the Smart TVs that followed, but they didn't. When they rug-pulled the "otherOS" feature that I was using to stream live (still) photos from WebCams in the Caribbean, that earned a NetTop PC a place in the living room, and from there PC based content sourcing became the norm in our house. To this day, we have no "Smart" TVs. Our BluRay players are not internet connected (and they play 99% DVDs, less than 1% BluRay content...)
Consumer behavior gets ingrained, hard to change when they're happy where they are.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I can see Microsoft just being the Azure company at this rate. Then they’ll have to charge what it costs to run and a lot of companies will wish they had stayed cloud agnostic.
The business is basically thirds last I looked. Windows, Office and Azure.
Not sure how their purchase of platform companies they shouldn't have been allowed to buy plays into that. Thinking LinkedIn and GitHub.
They already make money hand-over-fist on Azure. Cloud computing is already quite expensive
So the Microsoft brand is just for show and it's actually called Azure.
load more comments
(4 replies)
If you don't own the storage, you don't own the content. You're just renting it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
They did this with "plays for sure" DRM protected music files too, way, way back. Never bought content of any kind from them after that and then killing Windows LIVE.
Just assume everything from them has a "destroy after" date set in the near future.
Ahoy.
First time I hear about this store...
I may have seen it, but it "felt wrong" from the start - never considered it anything of interest.
Me too lol
I never heard of it... News to me.
Remember when Xbox required a Live subscription to use the any streaming entertainment app?
I distinctly remember them failing a console launch spectacularly by (among other things) trying to pass it as a media center and talking about how great it is to watch TV on.
Don't forget one needed to stay online with Xbox Live subscription even for basic functionality and gaming during XBOne's E3
Not to mention games were heavily reliant on DRM so you can't trade discs easily
Meanwhile Sony...
You'll still be able to access content. But for how long?
Wait.. they had a movies and TV store?
It was terribly overpriced. No idea who used it.
view more: next ›