While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn't worth if something wasn't popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there's nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?
I thought to those delisting reasons:
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Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that's a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said "you only have 6 months to get this game, act now" and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they'll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like "uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I'll think about that"
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Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it's using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.
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Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who's going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?
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Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn't want to be associated with that anymore
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Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn't work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they're unable to patch it.
In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.
If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:
- Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
- Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a "near mint" edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)
And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an "illegal" torrent.
In short: they don't want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free
A few weeks ago there was this article posted here about why some game companies are trying so hard to kill their old video games and give 0 shits about preservation (as in delisting them from stores, not selling them anymore, etc.).
One of the answers given by the publishers in the article basically boils down to "old, preserved games would compete with the newer ones and eat into their sales", which does say quite a lot - they don't care about losing sales of older video games, all that matters is the sales of the newer ones, preservation be damned.
Alongside this comment was an equally damning comment: "if your past games are competing with your new games then your new games aren't worth buying in the first place."
It also somewhat says they know the new games are nowhere near as good as the good ol' ones, which is one of the big reasons to pirate older stuff.