Six more games have quietly and unannounced left Steam, all of them either published or developed by Codemasters…

In 2021, we heard that Andrew Wilson’s company had bought out Codemasters (who had since acquired Project Cars developer Slightly Mad Studios) and that Electronic Arts had taken over the F1 license, which is released annually in the form of a game. However, there is already a sad and reprehensible strategy at work here: if an F1 game is more than two years old, it is essentially no longer available. Around the time F1 24 was announced, F1 22 was removed from digital stores. (And in the meantime, the series has been using Denuvo since 2016, which makes things difficult from an archiving standpoint…).

But that’s not the point: on March 14, six games were removed from Steam at the request of publisher Electronic Arts. We can say this with certainty because, according to SteamDB, all six games were made unavailable for purchase on Valve’s digital platform with an “app_retired_publisher_request”. What titles are we talking about? Damnation, Hospital Tycoon, Maelstrom: The Battle for Earth Begins, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, Rise of the Argonauts, and Toybox Turbos.

Since all six games are pre-EA, this move raises questions about how much Electronic Arts respects Codemasters’ previous ownership. Neither Codemasters nor Electronic Arts have commented on the removal of the six titles, and it’s unlikely that any of them will be available for purchase on Steam again (so they’re abandonware titles…?). They’re all on the GOG Dreamlist, a community-run wishlist where gamers can vote for older games they’d like to see kept on PC. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the titles in question will be available for purchase on GOG… It’s becoming increasingly common these days for many games to disappear from the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and Steam, leaving them legally available only on disk… but that’s becoming rarer and rarer.

Source: GameRant