14 DAY TRIAL // Those gamers who have bought the Xbox One digitally distributed version of the recently introduced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are at the moment unable to launch the video game, apparently due to some problems linked to the Xbox Live infrastructure.
The announcement on the official status page that the company maintains states, "Are you unable to launch or install The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? We’re working to address this ASAP! Thanks for staying patient. We’ll fill you in as soon as we know more."
At the same time, the Xbox 360 is affected by some issues with Minecraft and screenshots.
Microsoft is working as fast as it can to solve the problem, but a lot of gamers who are trying to progress in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be annoyed with the company.
Earlier in the year, those who bought the digital versions of Far Cry 4 were affected by a similar problem on the Xbox One, which might be a sign that there's a deeper problem with the online infrastructure used by Microsoft.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt copies that were bought physically are not affected in any way, so it's unclear what percentage of the community cannot currently play the title.
Digital distribution continues to be important for current-gen consoles
Since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was launched, the development team at CD Projekt RED acknowledged a number of issues with the title and it moved quickly to solve them with patches on both home consoles and the PC.
The current Xbox One issue is entirely connected to Microsoft and the way it authenticates its video games.
GameStop recently announced that digital distribution was gaining ground on all platforms and that in the future both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One would get more titles that have no physical version.
The problem is that issues like the one The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt players are currently experiencing might discourage players from making the switch to collections that exist entirely in the cloud.
On the PC, Steam dominates the digital distribution market, but no title was affected by this kind of connectivity issues on the service in recent memory.
Update: The issue seems to have been resolved, as Microsoft no longer displays it on the official website.