That’s insane though, right? This kind of thing should be made very clear when you purchase. There should be a pop-up that you have to accept before the purchase goes through. There’s no reason why the store shouldn’t be able to detect whether you have the required subscriptions if these are required to play the game.
I also don’t understand it. I have the game on Game Pass, which is where I mostly play, but I also purchased it outright for my Steam Deck when it was on offer recently. There are no subscription requirements for that, so why do Microsoft require we have Xbox Live Gold?
The only thing I can think of is that it’s required so you can play against other Xbox players, as some traffic will likely be routed through Microsoft’s servers (although I’d imagine that would only be for the initial game setup and not for the actual game as then you’ll be talking to the Party Animals servers direct, surely?).
I can’t think of any technical reason why this is a requirement from Microsoft. The game already supports cross play, so there’s no reason they can’t just let you play against other non-Xbox players if you don’t have a subscription and don’t want to use Microsoft’s servers. You should be able to play against PC players at the very least.
This seems like a really dumb idea. Am I missing something here? @Sammyzilla, I’m sorry to hear this happened. I’d be pretty upset about this too if it’d happened to me. Can you do anything with the game at all? Even a Custom game with AI bots uses the servers for the physics calculations (I think), so are you just stuck with an install you cannot play at all?