Alan Wake's Licencing Nightmare

[Rev]

As of today, the slightly disappointing but sort of decent game Alan Wake can no longer be sold, and has disappeared from Steam and other online stores.  They had a little blow-out sale ahead of time, but frankly if you were interested you'd have had it by now anyway.

The game features a small number of licensed music tracks from the likes of Bowie and Nick Cave.  The studio that made the game was owned by Microsoft at the time but has since been cut loose, and as a result - as far as I can gather - some of the music was licensed to Microsoft itself rather than the studio, so they give no shits about renewing the rights at this point.  This kind of situation also buggered Dirt 3, which is why Humble were briefly giving it away for free a couple of months ago before it was also 'disappeared'.

I understand the issues involved, but it does seem a bit 'all or nothing' when it comes to rights issues with games, like there's never any work put in to finding a reasonable solution to keeping the thing available.  I mean, even Still Game got that awful replacement theme tune.

[madhair60]

An absolutely awesome game. Fun as fuck from beginning to end. Did both DLCs and American Nightmare. Also fabulous.

[Lost Oliver]

Gah. This was on my admittedly short list of games to play, along with Stanley Parable. What a massive shame, sounded like a classic.

[Obel]

Great first hour but man what a repetitive game this was. I ploughed through until the end but was so relieved when it was done. Bit of a letdown all told.

[Ignatius_S]

Remedy are looking to relicense the music at some point - https://community.remedygames.com/forum/games/alan-wake/320271-alan-wake-sunset-sale-13-15-5-2017 but we shall see.

One thing I read said that the company said it wasn't that straight forward to change the music and they can't devote the resources to that.