Playing Minecraft for extended periods of time on console makes every other game crash upon...

I agree. Sudoku has all the problems of any store app or game I've ever tried to use. The longer you play, the slower it gets. Impossible to play for an extended period of time without restarting. Every fastest time I have for every level is always from
the first game I've played in any session. I've had it freeze and crash, and this is on an Asus ROG machine that shreds just about everything.

Then again, maybe this is why: MS games make a call to the server every time you click. Even though the game doesn't use much in the way of bandwidth, I think we can blame a lot of the problems on MS/Xbox Sudoku servers. It would
certainly make much more sense to run the game on your local machine and just serve the original set-up and send the results back to MS.

You shouldn't have a problem leaving a game running for extended periods of time. I've often left games running because I've forgotten about them and left games downloading over night and I've never had any issues. The only you need to do is to make sure
there is nothing covering the air vents on top of the console. I would recommend making sure not even a tiny part of the air vents are covered as that can cause it overheat after an extended period of time.

I'm less worried about it "hurting" my console and more concerned that it makes the games unplayable. How can I play a game if it just crashes every time?

I have been playing fine over the same period of time, so it may be an issue at your end unfortunately? try fully powering off your xbox and also router and see how it goes, have you played any other online games during this time for an extended period
and how were they?

Same here...a friend said that the xbox servers were crashed....any idea when this might be resolved? Will we be getting an extended period on our subscription for downtime on this and other services such as netflix?