6 ms·
Spec Ops: The Line permanently removed from Steam and other digital stores
- parasti 3y agoThat sucks, Spec Ops The Line is a hidden gem disguised as a generic shooter.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoTo 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.
- jfoster 3y agoIt's interesting that they only had a time-limited license to the music. I haven't played the game, but can any music be unique enough to justify its use with such undesirable licensing terms?
- zokier 3y ago> Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” 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.
- Ferret7446 3y agoIs it so iconic that Sony should be allowed to collect royalties >50 years after the death of its performer?
- GabeIsko 3y agoIt's ironic that a song that is regarded as a war protest song is preventing the distribution of a war protest video game.
- willcipriano 3y agoSony wouldn't do innovative stuff like host Woodstock if it wasn't for decades of royalties.
- breather 3y ago> is very iconic 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- michaelt 3y agoPresumably a time-limited license costs less. 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?
- t3rabytes 3y agoThey might not still have the game source and/or knowledge on how to recompile the game. There are lots of technical reasons that it might be entirely unworkable to do that even if they wanted to. (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)
- fbdab103 3y agoHas that situation improved at all? I appreciate many shops still cowboy code their way across the finish line, but I would think that big publishers might put more effort into ensuring digital preservation for potential remakes/ports/whatever. 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.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI think microsoft gets away with only getting binaries because they have a handle on the APIs you have to use for their consoles, so they can maintain backwards compatibility with a little translation, some shims, and the go-ahead from the publisher. 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".
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoAlas it seems a little too common in gaming. My favorite racing game Blur (played some today!) has an amazing licensed sound-track. The license expired & the game was taken down from online storefronts.
- vundercind 3y agoOh man, same. I check every now and then for a sequel or remake or something, on newer consoles. Nothing so far.
- stubish 3y agoI'd say plenty of music is worth it. Music that comes with decades of history and subtext. Music that instantly puts the intended audience into the right headspace and makes them go 'woah'. 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.
- adastra22 3y agoIt's absolutely insane to me that this is allowed. Music artists should have a right to charge for their work, but not in a time-limited way like this when the thing being created is timeless.
- stubish 3y agoYeah. My own manifesto is that once exposed to wider society, it becomes part of our culture and we the public gain some rights over the art from that. For reproducible art works, owners should be required to sell at a reasonable price, or others can freely distribute it. One side effect being you can't license a work for a limited period.
- usrusr 3y agoI could imagine that licensees for music in games ask for so wide a range of use cases and possible future distribution channels to be included in the licence, that licensors are genuinely scared that a forever grant would be almost like completely handing over the copyright. Licensees will want distribution over every future steam competitor, at any price point, in any form of package deal, remaster version, mod remix. Add gameplay videos and cloud gaming services, all far outside control of the original licencee, and the rights holder will find it almost indistinguishable from granting infinite transitive sub-licensing.
- kmeisthax 3y agoTime-limited licensing is the norm and has been for a very long time. Perpetual licenses are very difficult to negotiate in a way that's fair to anyone. 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.
- ndriscoll 3y agoThis[0] wasn't actually used in the game, but it weirdly fits after a couple layers of irony (the game is very anti-violence and makes the point that you, the player, are a murderous psychopath who only needed to walk away the entire time). If you know the full context it's a confusing mix of funny and really dark. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvs7LZit3lQ&t=47 https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvs7LZit3lQ&t=47
- Levitating 3y agoThis is the case for all Steam games afaik.
- haunter 3y agoHappens all the time on Steam (yes you can still redownload the game if you bought it) https://steam-tracker.com/ https://steam-tracker.com/
- BadHumans 3y agoIt does happen all the time but I think the explaining the reasons are important because this can happen for different reasons. A game listed on that link is Hitman 2. Hitman 2 is not available for purchase because it was superseded with Hitman: World of Assassination which is Hitman 2 combined with Hitman 3
- Jare 3y agoDespite all appearances, Spec Ops is a masterpiece and a really unique game, there's nothing else like it. I wish that some preservation effort managed to make a version without expiration date.
- vb6sp6 3y ago[dead]
- Qwertious 3y ago>I wish that some preservation effort managed to make a version without expiration date. The solution is piracy. If they haven't already made a profit by now then they were never going to, and practically speaking they can't stop us. Seriously, just copy the files of the version in your steam library and send em to anyone who expresses any interest in the game. Nobody real will be hurt.
- stavros 3y agoYou don't need to do that, there are perfectly good torrents. Just get one of those.
- totetsu 3y agoI was really surprised by it also. It’s so self aware.
- wolf89618 3y agoThe reason: >several partnership licenses related to the game are expiring (says the publisher, 2K) >The licenses referenced likely have to do with the game’s music. During the The Line’s menu screen, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” can be heard while the game’s soundtrack includes Martha and The Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run.”
- moritonal 3y agoIt's frustrating that the fix isn't to just remove the music files and continue selling, with the game auto falling back to some default track.
- wccrawford 3y agoThere'd be a bigger uproar about that. Other games have removed problematic tracks and the fans were rabid.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoSome people might get the idea that they can download some files from the internet to restore the missing content. And that would be piracy and that is wrong! I definitely didn't download Japanese vice files that were "missing" from a game.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ecliptik 3y agoRecommend "Why Spec Ops: The Line Mattered" by Game Makers Toolkit[1] if you are unsure why this game gets the praise it does. I first played it when it was a free PS+ game years ago thinking it looked like a fun, if not generic, Modern Warfare clone. Which it is, until it isn't. I haven't played a military shooter since. 1. https://youtu.be/tYk0BS84ItY https://youtu.be/tYk0BS84ItY
- crooked-v 3y agoIt's one of those cases where something leans so hard into the satire that, at first, it's not obvious it isn't just the same thing it's satirizing.
- pests 3y agoI feel this is what happened to /r/The_Donald
- bno1 3y agoErrant Signal's analysis is also really good: https://youtu.be/wlBrenhzMZI https://youtu.be/wlBrenhzMZI
- as1mov 3y agoIt's a pretty good game fwiw, though I never got the reverence it receives from the internet. Maybe it's a symptom of shoddy writing in videogames that anything that strays from the norm gets praise. I always felt the story was told in a really hamfisted way, not to mention the cheap twist at the end sours the experience. There's another game which came out roughly at the same time and tried to tackle similar themes - Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, but with less in your face commentary. It was loathed both by critics and players for it's aesthetics and frustrating gameplay, but I've always loved it for what it attempted to do (and imo, did it better than Spec Ops). I wonder how both would be received if they were released today.
- wkat4242 3y agoI really loved the ethical angle but yes the gameplay was just another call of duty knock-off. The story was what made it special. I think it deserves some praise for that but not as much as it gets.
- WeylandYutani 3y agoCan we please change videogame music licensing to how the movie industry works? Nobody is going to jank away Apocalypse Now because of the Doors contract expiring. I know I know videogames are just toys not art etc etc. But they make more money than anything else now.
- djur 3y agoIt's a lot more common for people to watch a 10, 20, 30 year old film than to play a video game of the same age, especially in a way that results in revenue flowing to the original creators. A perpetual license for the in-game music is a waste of money from that perspective.
- hx8 3y agoAccess to this game is now limited to the second hand market. This generates artificial scarcity and reduces its potential audience. Luckily Spec Ops: The Line sold physical discs and was not too bogged down with DRM so it's still possible to obtain a license to run the game. While this specific incident is tragic, we should recognize this type of loss is a common occurrence. We need to do a better job of recognizing video games as culturally relevant art that should be preserved. Preserved not only for archival -- but preserved in a way we can share with future generations. The current system of used video game markets and the occasional 'museum' doesn't work well. Emulation is the only thing making the situation bearable and it's legal stability is questionable. There's a few improvements we can do. One simple win is to require all published games to be submitted to a central cataloging and archival agency. This way we know the art won't be lost forever. A bigger win would be to open up alternative distribution pathways for games that are no longer published. Perhaps games not actively published should have significantly reduced copyright times. Perhaps a digital library system could exist for these games.
- mike_d 3y agoI cleaned out my garage a few weeks ago and remember thinking to myself "damn I loved playing this game" before I tossed the XBox disk. :(
- wkat4242 3y ago> Access to this game is now limited to the second hand market. It's still available on gog for now who don't allow DRM so definitely the place to buy this
- tetrisgm 3y agoOne thing this game does masterfully is create situations with multiple possible outcomes without telling you. Spoilers below. One scene has you surrounded by an angel mob of civilians. They want to kill you but you are armed to the teeth. You've been through some shit and your character is really over with it. I sat there not wanting to mow down 20 civilians. I really didn't want to do it. I shot a few shots in the air, and they all started running. I felt a bit relieved, but what a powerful moment.
- wkat4242 3y agoYes, the core action that triggers the story is unavoidable though. I tried to go back and avoid the area in question with my fire after seeing the result but it didn't matter. Not being more specific for spoiler avoidance and it's really understandable because this is the core the story is all about. There are more key plot points where you just can't proceed. The game tricks you into thinking you're doing the right thing at the time, which is very smartly done. But once you know you can't avoid them. But yes it just makes sense because without them there simply is no story. To me it did make me question though what actions I would do in a computer game to make me feel like it's necessary to progress in the game. It was a very interesting point to make. The user doesn't usually have this kind of agency in games, and it's really "kill all those dudes or stay stuck here forever". I thought it was a much smarter and more intricate point to make than the usual anti-game violence BS. By extension (outside of the fictional realm) it is also a question of what kind of orders you'd follow as a military but luckily I have never been in a military and I never would join one voluntary because I don't believe in unconditional obedience. But yet in games my ethical concerns disappear. Logical in some ways because it's not the real world but on the other hand, yeah it makes me think. That's the only thing I really remember this game for, because gameplay-wise it really was kinda meh.
- fortytwoandone 3y ago[dead]
- tetrisgm 3y agoI believe it's commentary on a mission like No Russian in Modern Warfare 2. It does let you go through the mission without killing anyone, but it strongly encourages that.nthis game has like 5 scenes that mess with such player interactions. Really good way to make us reflect.
- wkat4242 3y agoToo bad. This game had a really surprising ethical angle that set it apart from the usual thirteen in a dozen first person military shooter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilv 3y agoSounds like this was an unusually noteworthy work, and culturally relevant. Of course, the publisher, 2K, is not in the business of cultural preservation. But 2K did remaster the Mafia series, for later consoles. Could it possibly make business sense for 2K to remaster "Spec Ops: The Line" for current-gen consoles and PC (and resolve the issues with music licensing, or whatever, as part of that effort)?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vivzkestrel 3y agoList it for 24 more hrs please, I want to buy it, it was on my wishlist
- wkat4242 3y agoIt's still on gog.com
- livrem 3y agoEveryone keeps saying the story is great, but as someone that cares way more about gameplay than story I could not make it very far into this game. It plays basically like Operation Wolf, but in 3D. After being railroaded through a few shooting galleries I arrived at a level that was more difficult, and after failing a few times the game asked me if I wanted to switch to Easy Mode. Then I uninstalled it. Maybe the story is great, but I'd rather watch a movie or read a book for a good story.
- ytoawwhra92 3y agoA lot of praise for writing/stories in video games comes from people who've never read a novel recreationally.
- jamesear 3y agoThe bar for writing in games is surprisingly low. I'll not mention any in particular, but IME even games noted for their writing have generic stories. Maybe there's something in the medium that constrains stories? A story explored through the eyes of a protagonist with limited actions (repeated an abnormally large number of times), who you know will eventually succeed.
- rldjbpin 3y agonot to shine too much light on to this, i wonder why does sony act on license agreements so much differently from steam? why is a conglomorate unable to negotiate the right for existing rights owner to continue watching their media and just pull out from the store?
- Donaldbendo 3y ago[dead]
- Donaldbendo 3y ago[dead]