With the recent news that Sega will be delisting 2018’s Yakuza 3 Remastered on February 12th to coincide with the release of Yakuza Kiwami 3 + Dark Ties, it’s called into question: why do games keep getting delisted, anyway?
This isn’t the first time the Yakuza franchise alone has done such a thing; Yakuza 0 was delisted last December and replaced with Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut. Meanwhile, in 2021, the Japanese exclusive Like A Dragon: Ishin! was also delisted, and replaced with the worldwide-release Like A Dragon: Ishin! (released in Japan as Like A Dragon: Ishin! Kiwami).
A game getting “delisted” is a fancy way of saying “removed from sale”. In the digital age we live in, games on digital storefronts have unlimited supply, unlike a physical shop. As such, when the decision is made to remove it from sale, the listing on those storefronts need to be immediately disabled – hence, “delisted”. In 99% of these cases, people who already bought the game still have full access to play and even reinstall.
But why remove a perfectly good game from sale? Well, here are the reasons that publishers justify such a decision.
Expired Licenses
Possibly the most common cause of games being delisted is licensing issues. It’s highly common to take popular IP from TV, movies and books, and adapt them into videogame form. However, nobody wants to sign over the rights in perpetuity.
As such, after some years pass, the contract runs out and the two companies likely choose to part ways, requiring the game to be removed from sale. Activision’s Transformers titles have a passionate fanbase, but unless Hasbro negotiates, they may never be made available to buy again.
Transformers: Devastation was like Metal Gear Rising meets Bayonetta, but hasn’t been available for years (image credit: Activision)
Licensing also extends to music. One of the biggest draws for racing games are their radios, featuring tons of real-life songs by popular artists. They can enhance the experience tenfold – but again, these licensing contracts don’t last forever.
When time’s up, publishers are forced to renew these contracts, likely at greater cost than before. Music can be very, very expensive to license – for good reason – and by the time a contract has expired, sales have likely already tapered off.
Consequences
This leaves few options. The music could be removed from the game, but that would harm the experience – especially for existing owners who will feel entitled to the music that was in the game when they bought it. Ask anyone who owns the older GTA games!
They could pay up, but the expense would never be made back in future sales. Thus, removing the game from sale becomes the safest option. It’s not completely impossible for games to come back from this: Alpha Protocol, an oft-forgotten espionage game, was relisted in 2024 with its licensed content intact.
A New Version Is Produced
Remakes and remasters are nothing new, but they seem to have become much more common in the last 5 years. It’s not only classics from long-gone consoles making comebacks though – even games less than a decade old are getting do-overs. Despite being based on a past work, these projects still cost a lot of money to make, and need to be priced similarly to entirely new games to recoup.
Yakuza 0 caused the niche series to become a breakout hit outside Japan, but has since been delisted in place of a controversial remaster (image credit: Sega)
However, this poses a dilemma, particularly for games originally released in the last decade or so. There’s a high likelihood that the original remains available, and at a lower price due to its age. It’ll also likely be subject to hefty discounts during sales. So what’s to stop the consumer from choosing the cheaper original over the expensive remaster? Or what if someone who doesn’t know any better doesn’t notice the remake?
Consequences
The original games do cut into sales, so the common solution is to delist the original game. This makes the new version the ONLY version, and guarantees anyone looking to buying the game goes in that direction. It’s a highly controversial move, and rightly so – there are definitely solutions.
Bethesda delisted the original Doom 3 from Steam in 2012 to make way for the BFG Edition, but always intended to relist the original after the launch sales peter out. The recent remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles includes a version closer to the original in presentation. These are great ways to preserve the original games while keeping sales where publishers want them – but it’s still not common enough.
Technical Issues
This issue is one you’ll most commonly see on PC, though console games aren’t immune. As technology marches on, the way our gaming machines work will change a lot. Heck, it’s why you can’t simply plug a PS3 game into a PS5 and have it play.
PCs are more complicated – any PC can theoretically try to run any PC game, but small changes in processors, graphics cards and storage over the years can cause incompatibilities that the developers of yesteryear could never have predicted.
“Can it run Crysis” has taken on a more tragic meaning given its issues on modern hardware… (image credit: EA)
Take Crysis, for example; developer Crytek believed the future were single-core processors of increasing speed, but instead the market shifted in favour of multi-core processors. Crysis, however, was only meant to run single-threaded, so a CPU in 2026 with a lower single-core performance than a 2008 CPU would genuinely have a harder time running the game. While Crysis still runs on most systems, it’s been delisted for good, despite co-existing with its remaster for a few years.
DRM implementation can cover both licensing and technical problems: copy-protection for games typically only lasts a few years. Usually, this’ll be patched out once it expires, but if the publisher no longer has the ability to remove the now-defunct DRM…well, now every single new copy is bricked out the box. Ask Operation Raccoon City or Tron Evolution.
Consequences
If bugs are bad enough that they can’t be fixed within budget, it’s not unheard of for publishers to simply give up and delist games. It’s unfortunate for the sake of preservation, but there’s a certain shadiness to selling a notably broken product. Sadly, when this is the case, nobody really wins.
Partners such as GOG sometimes take on the task of fixing these games for modern PCs, and built-in emulators for consoles have helped make older games available again, but this only accounts for a fraction of games lost to time so far.
Server Shutdown
Live-service games have been among gaming’s biggest earners in the history of the medium. They have also, however, been among the biggest flops in gaming history. These games promise an ever-evolving experience for you and thousands of other players worldwide. As such, a part of making the game work is providing a constant stream of content – and connecting everyone via servers. But this isn’t cheap at all, and if the money isn’t coming in, the lights can’t stay on.
The best flight in gaming, now with its wings clipped for good (image credit: EA)
Anthem, one of the first big live service flops of the 21st century, recently closed its doors for good, leaving the game completely unplayable. Resultingly, it’s been removed from sale, and there’s no hope of it ever being made available again. Games designed for these purposes are often done so with permanent online connection in mind, and can’t simply flip a switch to make an “offline mode” work.
Consequences
This has been by far the hardest reason for delisting to do anything about. If these games had featured an offline mode of some kind, things would be way easier. However, the games made during the live-service boom were never made with this in mind – some games calculate actual game logic server-side. Fans have been able to put in incredible work to mod in offline modes for games, or create a server of their own to keep the game alive.
One such example is Ubisoft’s The Crew, which shut down back in 2024. The “Stop Killing Games” movement has been formed with the intention to regulate these games to be designed with avoiding these consequences in mind, but the jury’s still out on if the EU will go through with it.
Conclusion
With all this laid out, it’s clear that sometimes, it’s tricky to avoid having to delist games. What’s unfortunate is that there’s very little in the way of a backup plan to preserve these games. Sometimes partners such as GOG step in to foot the bill when it comes to fixing tech issues, or renew licenses. Sadly, unless big things change in the world of legislation and copyright law, we’ll probably keep seeing more and more game be made unavailable.
If you want to help change this, support movements such as Stop Killing Games and GOG. Also, keep an eye on sites like delistedgames.com to see what’s in the crosshairs. You’d never see the Mona Lisa get shredded because someone else tried their hand at updating it with modern tools, so let’s not let the same thing happen to gaming.
