To preemptively prevent speculation:
"Players who have purchased the game can still download and play the game uninterrupted."
It's been removed from the store because licenses for the in-game music have expired.
"Players who have purchased the game can still download and play the game uninterrupted."
It's been removed from the store because licenses for the in-game music have expired.
is very iconic. and from publisher point of view this outcome is not all that undesirable, the continued sales of a over 10 year old single-player game presumably are fairly small.
and trivially accessible for free (and in a much easier distributed format that doesn't pay the copyright holder at all) far easier than buying this game from a private store. Further evidence copyright and its licensing is moronic—it doesn't protect original content, it destroys it.
They can always just release a version without the music. This is a 12-year-old game, though, so maybe the sales don't justify the effort?
(disclosure: work in video games at a big studio where I know for certain there are things we couldn't build again at this point without a ton of work)
For example, it is not outrageous for me to believe that Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo would require source code/build pipelines/something for any release on their marketplace. Or do they just accept a binary from developers?
That being said, I could easily believe that even if you had the game source code, there could be many additional bespoke toolkits, widgets, 3rd party binary libraries, etc all of which have their own inscrutable compilation process.
Nintendo also has the advantage of other people writing emulators for their hardware that they can take advantage of years later, but only for first party stuff. (later ps2 game releases for the ps3 did something similar, with sony hiring a prominent emulator dev)
I have to assume it's either licensing issues with toolkits/middleware or apathy that stops the release process being "ship us a binary and a docker container that can build it".
But why would a developer go for worse music or higher costs when licencing? Apart from a small, niche audience there is no long tail on sales. Almost everyone who would ever want to play this game has played it, and any future sales would be for peanuts or as filler in bundles. I think my copy was free or next-to-free, part of some giveaway or bargain bundle. The rare games with legs get a remake to work on modern hardware.
TV shows have a similar problem with music licensing. A number of high profile series from 90s and 00s are only available on old DVDs, as relicencing or even just redubbing with new music are not worth their effort. Nostalgia gains some sales, but it has aged and won't connect with new audiences.
From the copyright owner's perspective, the value of your work typically increases over time. You don't know by how much, but you do know that the only way to extract that potential value is to ensure you have something to coerce[0] your licensees back to another negotiation. Making licenses expire is an easy and obvious way to do this. Selling 'no-strings-attached' perpetual licenses is an extremely bad deal for you.
Think about it like buying DVD boxsets (remember those?) vs. a Netflix subscription. If you buy the boxsets, that's it, you never have to pay for that show again[1]. If you subscribe to Netflix, you own nothing, meaning not only you have to keep paying for access to that show, but also that Netflix can jack up your rates and you'll pay them to retain access to the shows.
Even if a perpetual license is made available, it might not be something the licensee actually wants. The above was written from the perspective of a successful artist, but there's a flipside: works that lose value and decay in cultural relevance. The vast majority of cultural works decay like this. As much as I'm bullish on games preservation, games are especially bad at retaining cultural value, because, among other reasons, we burn down the world every 5-7 years with new console generations. A lot of games developers - or at least their bosses - are perfectly happy buying a cheap 5- or 10-year license and then just... throwing their work down the memory hole when it expires. The amount of people still buying Spec Ops: The Line in 2024 is so low that the music license would eat up all the profits and the publisher would be in the red renewing it.
Yeah, keep in mind too: all of these licenses are going to have minimum guarantees. When you license a copyrighted work, you're expected to pay a lot of money up front[2], purely for the privilege of having made that deal. Yes, you could pay a certain percentage of Steam sales, but this is almost always in addition to payment up front. First off, copyright owners don't like working with under-capitalized entities[3]; second, promises of future revenue are easily manipulated in ways that money showing up in your bank account isn't. The licensee has to open up their books and you have to trust that they aren't under-reporting copies sold.
[0] In the gun-to-head sense. When you use copyright to extract supra-competitive (read: any) profit from licensees, you're using a little bit of the government's sovereign power.
[1] Higher quality releases excepted
[2] Anime licensing calls this a "minimum guarantee", I don't know if that's a common term in other creative industries.
[3] The reasons for this are a complicated mess of elitism and business reality. Remember: the value of a copyrighted work is entirely in your ability to create demand for that work and restrict its supply. Licensing to anyone and everyone is contrary to this. Hell, game preservation as a whole is contrary to this.
I'm not following your argument here. If the value of the music and the game that it's used in both decay rapidly you should be able to come to a reasonable fixed fee that represents the net present value of the license.