It’s easy to make Activision look like the bad guy. After all, the company has recently been in hot water with the community after laying off nearly 800 employees earlier this year. Now, some more fans are upset after Activision pulled 14 of its games from the PlayStation Store, presumably after a licensing deal has ended.
Now, this isn’t a situation that’s exclusive to Activision. Licensing deals expire all the time. Especially with music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, both of which have songs that are no longer available for purchase on the PSN. More recently, this has happened with LEGO The Lord of the Rings and LEGO The Hobbit.
With Activision, some of the games it pulled aren’t that old, like Deadpool, Ghostbusters, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. The full list is as follows:
Angry Birds Star Wars
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Deadpool
Ghostbusters
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
The Legend of Korra
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5
Transformers Devastation
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark
White Night
Seeing stories like these makes you wonder just how an all-digital future will work, wherein companies can pull games from their platforms, leaving them virtually unplayable anymore. If you have physical versions of any of these, you can still pop in the disc and play, but anyone who wants to buy them digitally will now be out of luck. In addition, if you already have them digitally, you will still be able to play.
Sure, keeping up with licensing fees can be expensive from a business perspective, so it’s understandable why games get pulled. But as a consumer, it’s unfortunate that we don’t have digital access to these games anymore.
Even if none of the aforementioned games will blow your socks off, it’s always sad to hear about digital games being pulled from PSN. What do you make of this? Let us know!
[Source: ResetEra]
