Unable to play games from an external hard drive?

Germain Lopez · Jul 4, 2023

Why am I no longer able to play Xbox S/X optimized games from my external hard drives if I was able to play them previously while they were saved to my external drives such as Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege, Halo Infinite, etc. I was able to play this games before. If I’m not able to play this games off my hard drives then how can I download the non optimized version of this games or this Microsoft way of forcing me to buy their branded external hard drives?

:)

WUIJIBOBO

Are you able to transfer the games to an external hard drive? I had an issue with Battlefield 4 a few years ago where I was unable to launch the game, unable to complete an update for the game and unable to move the game from the internal hard drive to the
external hard drive. What I ended up having to do was transfer all my other games and apps to an external hard drive, then I removed the hard drive, and performed a factory reset on the Xbox One console itself. Once I did the factory reset, I was able to download
battlefield 4 and it started to work properly again.

I know it's a lot of hassle, especially if you don't have an external hard drive because then you'll have to redownload everything, but it may fix the issue that you're currently dealing with.

Jack72themaster seli

Okay but I have an external hard drive yet it's still not letting me play it despite it being licensed by Xbox it was over 80 freaking dollars I can't even play any games without re-downloading them to the console I got ripped off 80 bucks because I have to play on the console so I wasting 1.6 terabytes of storage

Smwutches

There are a handful of games that will work on a regular external hard drive, but for the most part, optimized games will only run from the internal drive or the expansion cards that are made specifically for those consoles. It's actually always been that way.

Germain Lopez

I recently changed from an Xbox one to an Xbox series x I had the games before they were “optimized” and I was able to play them directly from the external hard drive until they updated. Also it doesn’t make sense for online games such as Fortnite to only be able to be played if they are download directly to the internal drive or am I missing something?

Smwutches

It's only on the Series S/X that they can't be played on a regular hard drive. The hard drive is too slow to run the games properly. The One is fully capable of running all games from the internal or any external hard drive. The One wouldn't have been playing optimized games at the full S/X optimization due to hardware limitations.

Unable to play games from an external hard drive?