What happens if your game is deleted?
Cory Davis woke up one January morning to some unfortunate news: Spec Operations: The Line, the game he directed for Yager Development, had been removed from digital stores. Within 24 hours, the game would disappear from Steam, GOG and the Xbox Store. At the time of writing this article, it is not available to purchase new digitally.
“At first I thought: This is probably a bug or something that will be fixed in the next few hours, so I was kind of in denial mode,” he told Polygon. “After a while it became clear that it wasn’t just Steam, it was coming from other stores as well.”
The 2012 shooter didn’t perform as well as publisher 2K Games would have liked when it first launched, but it has become a cult classic for the way it subverted the imagination of other military shooters of the era. “We were all very shocked. It’s kind of a feeling like your mark on the world is being erased,” Davis continued. “All games are extremely difficult to execute and put into the hands of people who understand and enjoy them. There’s just so much extra effort put into this one. (…) We broke a lot of boundaries that are still difficult, especially for AAA games.”
There are many reasons why a video game may be removed from search results or taken offline. A 2K spokesperson revealed this in a statement Spec Operations: The Line was removed “due to the expiration of several partnership licenses related to the game,” which makes sense since the game uses a lot of licensed music, including Jimi Hendrix songs. However, the reason why games might be removed from the list could be much more complicated than that. For example, a series of Adult Swim games were recently removed from Steam; a representative of the publisher’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, told a developer that the decision “stems from logistics and resource constraints” but provided no further details. When a developer is delisted, they are often left in limbo, having to rely on the publisher to resolve licensing or other issues, all while knowing that their game is not legally available digitally anywhere.
Video games disappear all the time. The Video Game History Foundation co-managed one This was evident from a 2023 study “Only 13 percent of classic video games published in the United States are currently in release.” That means that almost nine out of ten games can only be played if you find a physical copy on a second-hand market or if you pirate one online. Even if a game is available for purchase, it may not be playable as many games are taken offline and their servers shut down due to corporate decisions. Last week, Sony Interactive Entertainment and developer Sumo Digital announced that the servers for LittleBigPlanet 3 would be taken offline indefinitely due to ‘ongoing technical issues’. At the end of last year, Ubisoft revealed that this would be the case removal from the list The crew of all online stores and would close the servers on March 31. “While we understand this may be disappointing for players, it was necessary due to server infrastructure and licensing restrictions,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Polygon.
In many cases, what happens to a game as it ages comes down to who owns the intellectual property. It could be the developer or the publisher, although this depends on the contracts the two parties have signed. For example, if the developer owns the IP and the publisher decides that he no longer wants to market the game, the developer can market it himself (subject to any other agreements, of course).
Ryan Morrison, co-founder of video game law firm Morrison Cooper, says he has seen many studios with contract issues that have led to delisting. It’s part of the reason he started his company in the first place.
“I was also part of the Reddit game development community. (…) And I remember going from there and basically just putting out a message saying, ‘Trademark your stuff,'” he said. “And instead of yelling at me or going in a wild direction, they said, ‘What’s a trademark?’ And I saw that there was a whole industry of people who were just afraid to talk to lawyers.”
However, there are a number of paths you can take if a game is removed. First, when licensing agreements expire, the developer or publisher can make a deal with the licensees. The first Alan Wake, for example, was able to return to stores after Microsoft, the original publisher, straightened out its music licensing deals, but it took more than two years to be relaunched. Developers can theoretically just make a backup of the game themselves. Owen Reedy, creator of Small radios, large televisions, has made the title available for free after it was released by Warner Bros. Discovery was taken private, although this could be a risk depending on the IP agreement. Overall, Morrison suggests that developers and publishers engage in conversations when something like this happens.
Unfortunately, in some cases there is no one available – or at least someone obvious – who can have that conversation. Brandon Huffman, an attorney at Odin Law and Media and volunteer counsel for the International Game Developers Association, told Polygon in March that some former Adult Swim Games developers didn’t know who to talk to if their game was delisted or would be removed . in the future.
“I’ve talked to some developers (Adult Swim Games) who don’t know who their contact would be to get the rights back because it’s such a big company,” Huffman said. “And so navigating this point, If I want to get out of here, how do I get out? Who should I call? That in itself is not clear to them.”
In a perfect world this wouldn’t happen. Morrison suggests that agreements should include clauses for these situations. “Whether it’s a month or a hundred years, there should be a mechanism wherever the rights go. Who has the ability to renegotiate? What is happening? Not this void of nothingness.” In general, he encourages developers to always have contracts reviewed by an attorney to ensure all conditions are met.
There are also cases where a game can come back even after going offline permanently. The free-to-play team-based shooter Huge was released in 2017, but the servers were closed about a year later due to low player counts. However, the game was re-released as paid in 2024 Huge: Rampage Edition. This was possible in part because members of the original publisher, Perfect World Entertainment, were part of the process. (Perfect World was renamed Gearbox Publishing San Francisco after it was purchased by Embracer Group, and has since been renamed Arc Games.)
“We have received the latest version of the game and some of Motiga’s original documentation. While we didn’t interact with the former Motiga developers, there were several people on the publisher side who were part of the original Huge launch,” Bart Vossen, game design lead at Abstraction Games, told Polygon via email. “So the first step was to familiarize ourselves with the game, fill in the gaps in the documentation, and see what the fans loved about the game that made it so great. This informed our approach to new content, which should fit and complement the game that was already there, and the parts we’ve rebuilt.”
This wouldn’t have been possible without fan feedback over the years, Arc Games producer Maverick “Mav” Bautista said via email. “For anyone considering reviving an old IP address, I’d say look at your community first. The Huge community played a big role in our decision to bring Huge back, so thank you very much for their continued support!”
There have also been grassroots community efforts to keep games online; fans of the MMO City of Heroes were able to create their own servers with the game’s source code, and were recently given the right by developer NCSoft to do so make one server official. Players are also trying to bring the issue to lawmakers. Ross Scott, creator of the YouTube channel Accursed Farms, started the Stop killing games campaign to raise awareness about this The crew‘s closing. The hope is to influence EU lawmakers – especially in France, which has many consumer protections – to investigate the issue of games becoming unplayable for the people who bought them.
“The best-case scenario would be at least one major country saying, ‘No, your companies will be fined if they do this,’ where if you pay once for a game or, I guess, a microtransaction, it will be sold. as a good. Then you should at least make some provisions so that if you end support, I can keep it,” Scott told Polygon. If a game were to miss out on a huge market, this would force studios to avoid delisting. “Once that happens, I think we’ll see a big shift in the industry.”
However, we are still in a world where a game can be deleted forever. Platforms and online servers shut down over time, and if the game lives online it’s unlikely to come back unless it’s in a case like Huge.
Although Davis could not comment on any discussions about this Spec Operations: The Line, he advised that developers should create contingency plans if there are risks in a game that could lead to delisting. He also proposed a kind of ‘switch’ that could remove the problematic elements and provide alternatives. All of this could allow games to easily come back online instead of waiting for a possible re-release.
“It’s me, along with over a hundred developers, who still hold this project, the experience of development and everything, close to our hearts,” Davis said. “It’s something we won’t forget. We are still hopeful for the future and really hope that new gamers will have the opportunity to play the game.”