If you digitally purchased Far Cry 4 for Xbox One, you might have trouble playing the game right now. As first reported by Videogamer.com, some players are having difficulty launching the game, due to a bizarre issue where the game currently isn’t listed on the Xbox Marketplace.
Others players are still able to launch Far Cry 4. It’s unclear what’s causing the inconsistency.
Welcome to 2015 and the unintended consequences of DRM, in which well-intended policies meant to discourage piracy end up hurting paying customers who haven’t done anything wrong.
Though Far Cry 4 still comes up when searching the Xbox Marketplace, it’s impossible to access. Microsoft’s service status for the Xbox Live service doesn’t list this as an issue right now.
Kotaku has contacted Microsoft for comment, but we’ve yet to hear back from the company.
A thread on Ubisoft’s message boards includes an acknowledgement the publisher:
When I asked about the issue on Twitter, a Ubisoft customer service rep got back to me:
https://twitter.com/patrickklepek
Another user told me he purchased the game on day one, unlocked every achievement, and can’t get back into the game. When Far Cry 4 tries to load on his Xbox One, it produces an error.
It appears Far Cry 4 has experienced this problem in the past, too. A reddit thread from a month ago reported the exact same issue with the exact same game. When loaded, Far Cry 4 produced a “content not available” message, despite players legitimately purchasing the game.
“I can access all other the other games I attempted to via the Store interface,” wrote reddit user willtomorrow at the time. “I hard reset my Xbox/Router and have still been unable to play the title. It’s been about 12 hours now that I’ve been unable to play the game, despite having had no issues for the last week or so.”
Unable to play a game you own for 12 hours? Ouch.
It’s unclear why Far Cry 4 keeps finding itself in this position, but it’s a bummer. Hopefully, the issues is resolved pretty soon. I’ll be keeping an eye, and let me know if you’re having trouble.
Comments
8 responses to “Some Xbox One Users Can’t Play Far Cry 4, Even Though They Paid For It”
Where’s the article that Destiny doesn’t let you play when their servers have issues despite being “not an MMO” and disc based owners owning the game? Decided to give Destiny’s DLC a second chance last night and behold “Cannot connect to servers” yet I see no controversy there.
Nba2k stopped getting civerage too when it was unplayable at times weeks after launch due to their servers. My physical farcry purchase is still working at the moment. Fun game hopefully fixed soon
What? Its been no secret at all that Destiny is an online RPG. It may not be ‘massive’ but they have made it clear from day one its online only.
Are you sure it was a destiny server error last night? I was able to play without issue. I can honestly count on one hand the number of times Destiny server issues (and not XBL/PSN) have affected me. On my XB1 a hard reset fixes a majority of problems connecting.
As someone who has played a LOT of destiny since its release, I’ll agree it has its gameplay issues but it just seems like a lot of people are bashing on it for the sake of it.
I dont think this is related but it could be… randomly the other day I went to buy D4 from Games with Gold and it kpet asking me to enter a payment option. After a while I realised that my account had changed to the UK for some reason… I had to change the region back online to Australia. Not sure if people’s account have changed and maybe thats causing some sort of mismatch?
I guess cos theres no region locking maybe not…
I am not able to launch the damn game either. I was dedicating this week of my holiday break to the game… now this. SAD FACE.
As a person who has just started to dabble in Digital purchases for my X1 this concerns me I thought once you had paid and downloaded the game it was effectively like owning the disk version and having it installed but without the disk to start it up obviously. i haven’t tried playing my digi games offline but i assumed I could or is this not the case? or is this issue just farcry 4 related
I double up on my games so they are mainly all digital and im sure I can play them all (unless they are a online only game) on my main xbox. I sure this was the case with dragon age when my internet was down.
Out of curiosity, does it work for people if they disconnect their console from the internet? My understanding is that the always-on internet connection isn’t required after MS changed their policy prior to releasing the console. It may be that, because the connection is available, the game is trying to check in with the server. I wonder if the connection is unavailable then the game won’t bother trying to verify things with the store and will just run it as normal?
Of course that’s not much help if you want to play it online…