Digital PC game retailer Steam has given an announcement that Tony Hawk: Pro Skater HD will soon be unavailable for purchase ever again. On July 17, publisher Activision will be pulling the game from Steam. The game will also be on an 80% weeklong deal until the removal date, so that people can buy the game for cheap before it's gone for good from the market. Activision nor Steam gave a reason as to why THPS HD will be removed, though it likely is due to the game's music content. A similar occurrence happened with Alan Wake, earlier this year, as the game was taken down, as the publishers were not willing to extend the music license. It is not known if the Xbox or PlayStation Stores will also face the same delisting, but PSN will update with new sales later today, so we could potentially have an answer by then.

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[Localhorst86]

I wonder what this means for existing purchases. I own the game on my Xbox 360. What if I delete the game off my harddrive? Will i be able to re-download it at some point? if I do, will the soundtrack be the one I purchsed initially?

 

[Ev1l0rd]

I wonder what this means for existing purchases. I own the game on my Xbox 360. What if I delete the game off my harddrive? Will i be able to re-download it at some point? if I do, will the soundtrack be the one I purchsed initially?

Steam always lets you keep the game, regardless of whether it's for sale or not. Source: Still have several of Digital Homicdes games, despite their little... meltdown a back in October.

 

[the_randomizer]

And not a single tear was shed.

 

[gudenau]

That's lame, guess third party stuff for this will be the only option if you get my drift.

I wish companies where a little less stingy.

 

[migles]

is there like a steam group or something that i can keep notified about games being pulled out?

 

[RedoLane]

here is Activision
doing everything they can
holding on to what they are
pretending they're supermen

 

[CheatFreak47]

Thanks for the heads up. In light of this news, I managed to snag both the game and the DLC (thanks to a kind soul over in the trade section) today for the low price of 2$ and a 5$ amazon gift card.

Game is a turd, but I have questionable taste in video games.

 

[driverdis]

i know
but it isn't fair that this company is still seling the game with music created by other companies, without paying theese other companies
it's not fair that the game company can still profit, while the people who created the music get zero from this new sales...

But that is up to the record labels to renegotiate so they still make money, not the developer.
in these cases when the game is pulled, it is the record label letting the license expire and not doing anything about it.

What is not fair is that the record labels are intentionally doing this and allowing whole games to be unavailable via legal avenues and making it hard to preserve the games as they were for future generations (not that any of them will actually play it)

The game devs/publishers do play a role in licensing but it comes down to the record labels not wanting to renew or charging too much money to allow it to be renewed.

 

[Plstic]

its not even worth buying this game. just pirate it. Take it from somebody who has played through all of them from the first game onwards recently and in the past.

 

[Deleted User]

-_- Seriously. Just because you aren't willing to pay for a license you take down the game? Holy hell that's fucking dumb. Either replace the music with royalty-free stuff if you aren't willing to pay cash or just remove it all together. This practice hurts the gaming industry imo. Now the only way to ever play this game is through piracy.

Removing the soundtrack would be kinda stupid though, I think replacing with royalty-free would be the better option. Though that's my biased opinion because I think music adds a lot to games ^^

 

[gamesquest1]

Removing the soundtrack would be kinda stupid though, I think replacing with royalty-free would be the better option. Though that's my biased opinion because I think music adds a lot to games ^^

If I was a publisher I would just leave all pc games with generic royalty free or original music but make it super simple/obvious for people to drop in a custom sound track, no point paying royalties on a bunch of songs and having your game pulled unless you keep up payments

Or at the very least have the royalty free backup tracks ready to drop the day the licences are up on the proper songs

 

[petethepug]

Just great. Now I can purchase a version for myself and invest in a copy for TF2 keys ._.

Honestly, why they did this instead of keeping the liscense is baffling.

 

[Deleted member 414991]

what why

 

[Deleted User]

Bought it for the hell of it.

 

[death360]

Noooooooo the worlds coming to an end what are we going to do without THPS HD.

 

[Nechikochan]

They don't lower DLC price.....

 

[Taleweaver]

And here i was, assuming that when a game company puts a game to the market, they own all their own content (or at least have not time-limited use of it). I get they don't want to keep throwing money at a game after people spend money on it, so I can understand they pull the plug on online servers at some point... But if i understand this correctly, they basically leased the music tracks. And that's not really fair to buyers (even though they apparently don't lose the game from their stream library).

I'm not really sure what to think of people quickly buying the game now. Those who really wanted it already had plenty of opportunity, and it's not like the game gets better Bredase there's a time constraint (wake up guys: none of us lives forever, so chances are you never make it through your backlog of games* in the first place).

* And even so: games gets churned out faster than anyone can consume, so an immortal one has no reason to buy it either

 

[Steena]

1) pick an old shitty "remaster" game that doesn't sell at all
2) announce it's never going to be sold ever again, also called "artificial scarcity to give a false sense of worth", also called "Nintendo"
3) except it's a digital good and supply can be infinite up until the deadline
4) put a discount on it
5) it's now on the news everywhere, has already gotten more exposure than some lesser known brand new games

Guaranteed this game will have more sales this week than it would in the next 10 years.
This may not have been done on purpose but there's no doubt companies will look at this and start doing the same to their old irrelevant games. And then you will have games being pulled and then added back in in a year or two, because there's no rules against this, and it's an amazing marketing strategy to get media relevance so why not.

My suggestion: don't be a literal sheep and buy this game if you don't want this to become a new cancerous practice for the industry.

 

[LordStarkiller]

I'm not overly attached to the THPS series but the first 4 stand out just because of the guest skaters they had. In THPS2 we got Spider-Man, in 3, we got Darth Maul, and I think in 4 we got Jango Fett.

 

[Arras]

-_- Seriously. Just because you aren't willing to pay for a license you take down the game? Holy hell that's fucking dumb. Either replace the music with royalty-free stuff if you aren't willing to pay cash or just remove it all together. This practice hurts the gaming industry imo. Now the only way to ever play this game is through piracy.

Honestly, it makes sense. Game devs are still a company, and they want to make money above all. If they expect no more than about 10k in revenue in the future looking at sales statistics but the music relicense would cost more than that, no sane company would ever agree to it. I imagine the game didn't/wasn't selling well enough for new music to be worth it either.