this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
79 points (97.6% liked)
Gaming
19949 readers
16 users here now
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
- 1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- 2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy "anti-woke" energy, you probably shouldn't be posting it here.
- 3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Haha, online games licensing sucks. It's almost as if, when we discovered we could distribute media freely and infinitely by digital means, we should have restructured how media and licensing works for these products. but we didn't, and now we have bizarre situations where publishers try to delete their own games from existence rather than spend some upkeep for music licensing
Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand "new" copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many "new" copies around. Also I can't fault publishers from just "deleting" a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven't sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren't even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.