Delisted Games on Steam

What happens when a game that's once easily brought on a given digital storefront is for one reason or another removed from the said store? This is called a delisting, meaning a game is taken out of a storefront by the publishers or whoever owns the rights of the game being delisted. weirdly enough I managed to buy several games before they got delisted, on steam your thankfully able to keep playing the old versions of the delisted game if you still have them installed. the reasons for these games being delisted from steam and other storefronts vary but a common cause is there is a new version the publishers want you to buy and they didn't want their older releases getting in the way of profits. This has happened to about six or more games in my steam library.

I don't really know if I could even call this an issue but more recent instances of this happening have raised personal issues for me. Sonic Origins came out bringing the classic sonic games back and the old original ROMs(raw game files which can be played on an emulator.) being sold by Sega in their Mega Drive and Genesis Classics collection as well as Sonic CD were delisted to avoid affecting the newer game's profits. Sonic Origins may have the same four games but they charged forty dollars which when put into a calculator would mean each game would cost ten dollars when the original ROMs for the first three classic Sonic titles were about five dollars to get the old ones. Thankfully the rest of the non-Sonic games in the Mega Drive and Genesis collection are still for sale but I am at least fifty percent sure that the Origins game only has the modified remastered versions and not the original ROMs so It's kind of a case of lost media.

Another game that got delisted in the old version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, while I would agree that the Special Edition on PC was the better version overall, I thought it was a bit unnecessary and I would have been locked out of even having Skyrim on PC if I didn't get the legendary edition when I did. as my PC specs wouldn't have been able to handle the newer versions of Skyrim on PC. I can understand why they delisted the original game but it still seems a bit much in my opinion.

In closing, I think that delisting is an overall negative thing at least in the case of games preservation of retro titles on steam. but there really isn't much that can be done to fix this issue.