Guide: How To Play Xbox Games Offline When Xbox Live Is Down
Image: Microsoft

How do you play your Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S games offline when Xbox Live is down? It can be annoying when it happens, especially when it roadblocks a ton of your games and essentially turns your console into a glorified blu-ray player for a few hours. Luckily, there’s a workaround so even if you’re hit with some pesky Xbox Live issues, you can still dive into your favourite single-player games.

Step 1: Make Your Xbox Your Home Console

This guide will assist those on Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S and keep you gaming for as long as possible. The first thing you need to ensure is that your Xbox is set as your home console (before Xbox Live goes offline), which is really simple. The reason being is to tie your gamertag to the system, ensuring Xbox knows that the digital games on the console are yours. Just do the following as instructed by Xbox:

- Press the Xbox button to open the guide.
- Select My Games & Apps > See All > Apps > Settings.
- Select General > Personalisation, and then select My home Xbox.
- Select Make this my home Xbox to designate the console as your home Xbox.

Step 2: Ensure Your Console Is Set To Offline

Once this is done, you’re well on your way to completing the final stage in ensuring you can play games offline. Thankfully, Xbox has handily provided another quick rundown of how to do so, and it couldn’t be easier:

- Press the Xbox button on your controller to open the guide.
- Select My Games & Apps > See All > Apps > Settings.
- Choose General > Network settings.
- Select Go Offline.

If you game share your titles with anyone else, unfortunately they will be locked out until the service is back online, so just make sure you change your system back to online by going through the same steps as before.

It can be a bit of a hassle to go through this process, but it’s simple enough to do. Just make sure you follow the steps, and revert to Step 2 when Xbox Live is back online to have full access to all the features, and you’re good to go!

We hope this helps you in the event of another Xbox Live outage. Let us know if you have any problems below.

[source support.xbox.com, via support.xbox.com]