This week has delivered yet another episode in the endless headache-inducing drama around video game preservation, as Ubisoft updated the Steam listing for Assassin’s Creed Liberation to announce the game would soon be delisted – prompting anger from preservationists and fans across the internet.
To be honest, the original circumstances around Assassin’s Creed Liberation looked pretty bad. The game’s Steam page was marked with an announcement that sales of the game would cease in September – pretty standard, if rubbish – but also with text that suggested that even those who already owned the game would no longer be able to download and install it after a certain date, too. And that… well, that’s a much worse look.
In this instance, the additional anger over the game being removed from paying customers was actually mistaken. A poorly-written prompt on Steam made people misunderstand what was actually going on. Rather than the game at large being deactivated for all, it was just the multiplayer component shutting down on that date – meaning that certain features will be unavailable, but the ‘base game’ will remain accessible for those who dropped cold, hard cash on it in the past. Once delisted, nobody new will be able to buy the game, however.
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