What's not to love about licensing? It ensures we have less games to threaten our backlogs by removing them from stores.




Ahem, starting today, the following five Need for Speed games will be removed from Origin and other digital stores:

Need for Speed Carbon
Need for Speed Undercover
Need for Speed Shift
Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed
Need for Speed The Run

I guess this just eliminated any chances of them coming here. Well, if you still want a digital copy for convenience or whatever other reason, there is not much time remaining.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/needforspeed/comments/np6uig/sun_is_setting_on_some_older_nfs_titles_its_not/

Thanks for the heads-up!

Well, we can always get them "DRM-free" (cough * cough) from certain digital "stores" (* cough * cough * cough ) :S

Aye

Reading the post it says the reason for delisting is that they are shutting down the online services rather than licensing. Is a shame as if they removed the online features they could repackage them here as offline games.

However many newer racing games are very heavy in online features.

Tells me everything I need to know.

Yeah I find it odd they wouldn't just keep selling them as singleplayer games and maybe lower the price. Though I know some NFS games are very online focused, more than the others, and these might be those. I don't see Most Wanted on here for example.

Anyway I'm not that into racing games so whatever.

Carbon was on Origin recently????? I think not.

I'm surprised the license for these games has lasted this long.

yo ho ho

They were on sale this past weekend.
They made this de-listing announcement, after the sale ended.

Also, these games been around for 10 years or so, so....I'm expecting these licenses for cars and music to be up soon too.

*Pulls an eyepatch and a cutlass

"Aarghh...Jim, me lad!...Go and fetch us some grog and a nice coupl'a torrents, aye?"

So are the car brands and shitty music you were going to mute anyway really worth pulling the games from the stores?

I do suppose that being EA, they probably didn't keep the tools archived, but I feel like it'd be a hilariously easy thing to just debrand the games.

Also for those less "seafaring inclined", the internet archive might have some of em.

- Also licensed car makes/models...which is a big reason why it's often hard for online stores to secure the right to sell said games.

-

So they get sales before being delisted? Another way some(not all) rights holders treat GOG customers like crap, it seems.

-

Read the other posts: it was more likely due to online features in said games.
(as for the cars: they'd likely need to redo the cars in-game enough so they didn't match any trademarked makes/models too closely....might be a bit of work to pull that off, or at least more so than muting/swapping music tracks)

Which is strange because cars could definetely fall under "fair use" in copyright terms. I know Activision (or was it another publisher?) recently said they were going to stop paying licensing fees to firearm companies to have their weapons in Call of Duty, claiming it was fair use.