What happens when your game gets delisted?
Cory Davis woke up one morning in January to some unfortunate news: Spec Ops: The Line, the game he directed at Yager Development, had been removed from digital storefronts. Over 24 hours, the game would disappear from Steam, GOG, and the Xbox Store. At the time of this writing, it’s not available to buy new digitally.
“At first I thought, This is probably a mistake or something that’ll be resolved in the next few hours, so I was kind of in denial mode,” he recounted to Polygon. “It became obvious after a little while that it was not just Steam, but it was coming down off of other stores as well.”
The 2012 shooter didn’t perform as well as publisher 2K Games would’ve liked when it first launched, but it’s become a cult classic for how it subverted the fantasy of other military shooters from the time. “We were all really shocked. It’s kind of that feeling like your mark on the world is being erased,” Davis continued. “All games are extremely difficult to pull off and to put in the hands of people who understand and enjoy them. There was just so much extra effort that went into this one. [...] We broke through a lot of boundaries that are still difficult ones, especially for AAA games.”
Related
There are a lot of reasons why a video game might be delisted or taken offline. A spokesperson for 2K revealed in a statement that Spec Ops: The Line had been removed “as several partnership licenses related to the game are expiring,” which makes sense since the game uses a lot of licensed music, including tracks from Jimi Hendrix. However, the reason why games might be delisted can be way more complicated than that. For example, a slate of Adult Swim games was removed from Steam recently; a representative from the publisher’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, told one developer that the decision “stems from logistical and resource constraints” but didn’t give any other details. A delisting can often leave a developer stuck in limbo, having to rely on the publisher to
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