Yesterday, IGN reported that Spec Ops: The Line had been delisted from Steam. Right this moment, we up to date that story with reporting that the sport had additionally disappeared from different digital storefronts, together with Fanatical, Gamesplanet, and Nuuvem. And now, we’ve affirmation from 2K themselves: some of the necessary video video games of the Xbox 360 and PS3 technology is disappearing from on-line storefronts for good.
2K Video games despatched IGN the next assertion confirming The Line’s delisting:
Spec Ops: The Line will now not be out there on on-line storefronts, as a number of partnership licenses associated to the sport are expiring.
Gamers who’ve bought the sport can nonetheless obtain and play the sport uninterrupted. 2K want to thank our neighborhood of gamers who’ve supported the sport, and we look ahead to bringing you extra choices from our label all through this 12 months and past.
Whereas 2K hasn’t offered specifics as to what partnerships are expiring, Spec Ops: The Line accommodates a number of items of licensed music, together with Jimmy Hendrix’s iconic rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Expiring music licenses have been the rationale for a lot of delistings in the previous, and that might appear to be a possible cause right here.
The uncommon navy shooter that critiqued the style
The delisting is just not solely an enormous blow to video games preservation, which already faces monumental challenges, however a loss for the medium in common. Spec Ops: The Line was some of the necessary and acclaimed video games of the seventh console technology and one of many uncommon navy shooters that dared to critique the style it operated in.
In our evaluate, we wrote, “Spec Ops is a daring experiment price celebrating. For the primary time, a
recreation with weapons would not need you to be the hero – it desires you to really feel horrible about attempting to be one.”
The Line helped to usher in a brand new, extra vital period of video video games primarily based on fashionable battle and produced a number of groundbreaking works of video games criticism, together with Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless, one of many first book-length analyses of a single online game. There is a cause individuals nonetheless speak in regards to the white phosphorus scene. It is a disgrace that quickly, individuals will now not be capable to entry it on digital storefronts.
As of the time of this writing, Spec Ops: The Line remains to be out there on Good Old Games and Xbox, the place it’s backwards appropriate. Anybody in buying it ought to most likely accomplish that earlier than it disappears into the guts of an immense darkness… for good.
Will Borger is an IGN freelancer. You will discover him on Twitter @bywillborger