Get 'Alan Wake' Before It Disappears From Stores On May 15

[heirdeux]

Remedy's musical license for the game will expire on May 15, but the company will look into renewing it so the game can return to the physical and digital storefront.

Get 'Alan Wake' Before It Disappears From Stores On May 15 : Read more

 

[dstarr3]

Well, that's sad. GRID and a couple other games vanished from Steam the other month, too, for probably licensing reasons.

I mean, really, it's not such a big deal. Before digital downloads, you only had, what, a few months of being stocked on shelves and that's the only time you made your money, and if someone wanted an older game, they were SOL. Nowadays, you can keep making sales as long as someone wants your game. That's a very welcome change for the industry. But now there's problems like this where licensing different things means it could actually cost money sometimes to keep your games available for sale.

Oh well. RIP, Alan Wake. You were a good game. I suggest it if you don't own it yet. Especially recommended at the sale price.

 

[toddybody]

This doesn't preclude digital owners from re-downloading it from Steam/etc? IIRC Steam has a strict provision that all titles will be available in perpetuity for owners. Hope this is true

 

[drwho1]

No mention of GOG? That's the best version of any game.

 

[clonazepam]

Rockstar released a mandatory patch for GTA San Andreas that removed music from owners games regardless of when they purchased it. I would always assume that the game itself is always available for redownload (so long as the platform itself exists), though a forced patch to remove licensed material is always possible and hopefully that wouldn't extend to other licensed bits of a game like its physics or other less obvious technologies tree generation or world loading.

 

[dstarr3]

This doesn't preclude digital owners from re-downloading it from Steam/etc? IIRC Steam has a strict provision that all titles will be available in perpetuity for owners. Hope this is true

Correct, so long as it's in your library at the time of removal, it's still in your library forever. I've got a few games that've been removed from Steam for various reasons, and it pretty much just means that the Store Page is removed to prevent new purchases, and that's about all. Forums still work, community pages still work, downloading it still works, etc. Even Steam keys that resellers haven't sold yet can still be redeemed. You just can't buy it from Steam directly anymore once removed.

 

[abbadon_34]

Physical copies are always best. They may disappear from the shelves, live forever in the used market.

 

[Thretosix]

Bought the Alan Wake Franchise Bundle on Steam for less than $5 on a sunset sale. Couldn't be happier.

 

[MannyBones]

I was going to sell my copy of Alan Wake (finished it on an Xbox 360 with a dying DVD drive, sometimes I couldn't hear the dialogue over the sound of the drive hunting). Maybe I'll wait a bit longer...