Did you ever pick Deus Ex Bound, the ideal mobile puzzler from Square Enix Montreal that restful ranks among the tip 150 puzzle games on the App Retailer despite charging actual cash to download? Then you definately’ll probably be frustrated to hear: Embracer Community, the massive conglomerate that’s gobbling up rights to franchises adore Deus Ex and Tomb Raider and The Lord of the Rings and more, has determined you can’t play it anymore.
Three weeks after shutting down the studio that produced it (which had incidentally correct finished going by means of an costly rebrand), Embracer has determined not most productive to take away their games from mobile app stores, it’s apparently taking the extra step of making them inaccessible even for these who’ve already downloaded them — or in the case of Deus Ex, even for these who’ve paid $5 or $6 to gain so.
“Latest players usually are not able to access the games past January 4th,” reads part of a tweet from the defunct Studio Onoma, which is also seeing three free-to-play games (Arena Battle Champions, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes) shut down. “We encourage prior in-game purchases to be stale before January 4th, as they are going to not be refunded.”
No refunds. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Usually when a downloadable game is removed from a digital marketplace, you can at least download a copy first — in many cases, you can even re-download purchased games indefinitely. (I can restful gain my Steam copies of Mass Stop 2 and Indigo Prophecy although they were yanked from the Steam store many years ago.)
But apparently that gained’t be the case right here. Like Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett says, it’s a games preservation tragedy. It’s also ready-made ammunition for critics of digital purchases, and of Embracer Community itself, which is already beneath scrutiny from gamers both for procuring up franchises and for taking a billion dollars from Saudi Arabia.
And it’s not clear why this is happening with Deus Ex in particular. There shouldn’t be a rights issue, correct? Embracer explicitly purchased the rights to Deus Ex alongside the mobile games studio that developed the title. All we know, via games journalist Jason Schreier, is that Embracer apparently determined it wasn’t in mobile games anymore.
The Embracer Community didn’t immediately reply to a set aside a question to for remark.
