"The themes portrayed in Spec Ops: The Line are more relevant now than ever," the game’s director said.
  • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
    533·
    5 months ago

    Unfortunately, the news that it won’t be available digitally is a huge blow to the game’s availability.

    If only there were other, off-market alternatives for acquiring video games that aren’t subjected to licensing agreements… 🤔

  • Vordus@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    26·
    5 months ago

    Oh god, it’s 2K publishing.

    Which means that the game disappearing from storefronts is one of the better case scenarios. It’s entirely possible that they’ll patch out the licenced songs from the soundtrack from every digital copy of the game.

    • Kayn@dormi.zone
      13·
      5 months ago

      That’s why I buy on GOG. There I can pull the installer for a game and hoard it when I know the next update is going to go bad.

  • angrytoadnoises@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    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

    • ThunderingJerboa@kbin.social
      21·
      5 months ago

      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.