Is it me, or are we seeing an unusual increase in the amount of digitally distributed games get yanked from the various marketplaces? Hot on the heels of the recent announcement of Outrun Arcade’s expiration, both
Doom and
Double D Dodgeball have been yanked from the Xbox Live Marketplace.
There is no reasoning at this point for the departure of
Double D Dodgeball, but
Doom is being cited as another issue of expired licensing agreements. The original XBLA port of
Doom was published by Activision; according to a statement from Zenimax (recently acquired by id Software) via
Joystiq, the title should be returning soon courtesy of Bethesda.
Is there any way in which these developers and publishers can avoid these issues? I don’t ever remember there being such an issue in the past with the pulling of retail skus. Are the licensing agreements on these digital games just “short sighted”?
