If you've ever tried to play a Windows 8-era game via the Xbox PC app, you might have run into an issue where it simply refuses to connect to any online services, and one particular project is aiming to raise awareness of how to fix it.
The Xbox Collection Tracker project on GitHub highlights how Xbox PC games used to utilise "XBL2.0-formatted XSTS tokens" to communicate with the servers when signing in, but this was eventually changed to the modern XBL3.0 format — and therefore older games from around the mid-2010s often receive an error message instead.
"Microsoft quietly deprecated the old
XBL2.0-formatted XSTS tokens used by the original Windows 8 Store generation of first-party titles. The games still install, still launch, still talk to*.xboxlive.com— but every request returnsHTTP 401 token_requiredfrom the server, the in-game sign-in prompt never completes, and features that depend on the player's Xbox Live identity (gamerpic, friend list, achievements, leaderboards) go dark."
The GitHub page mentions games like Microsoft Mahjong and Minesweeper, while a separate Reddit post lists the likes of Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Assassin's Creed Pirates, Dragon's Lair and Ty the Tasmanian Tiger as being affected.
In fact, we came across the issue in the following post about Hydro Thunder Hurricane from last year:
In a nutshell, this new Xbox PC project is designed to translate the old XBL2.0 style into a XBL3.0 style of response, meaning that the game connects properly to the Xbox servers and begins working as intended.
The people behind it are specifically trying to get the attention of Xbox leadership, telling engineers that all they need to do is implement a "thin XBL2→XBL3 translation layer the server no longer performs", and that everything can be done server-side to get these games running at their full capacity again.
"This project is a working proof that those titles can be bridged to the modern
XBL3.0token format entirely via public, documented APIs — no reverse-engineered private endpoints, no spoofed client IDs, no process injection, no binary patching. The goal is to demonstrate to Microsoft that the legacy stack can be reactivated with a thin compatibility layer, so that the preservation of these titles — and the achievement records users earned on them — is technically achievable."
If you're interested, here's how we initially discovered this project via a Reddit post (hit the "Read More" button).
Ultimately, this seems to be more of a proof-of-concept than something that's intended as a long-term solution, and the hope is that Xbox will take notice and implement this translation layer behind the scenes in an official capacity.
Of course, we don't know if there are any roadblocks to doing that — potential security issues perhaps being one of them — but the devs behind this project certainly sound confident in the solution, so here's hoping Xbox can find a way to restore these mid-2000s Xbox PC releases back to their full capacity.