Not my kind of game, so I have no dog in this fight, but man, it ought to be illegal to place a title on the market without having a perpetual license to all the content required to sell it indefinitely.
At least this game was on Steam, so acquiring a community demo shouldn't be an issue. I've seen that it is legal to distribute a game when there no legal way to buy the game. That's what happened when the community-made version of
Halo 2, Project Cartographer, which turned the sh1tty original PC release of the game into a
proper PC release. It comes with the full game, and you could just freely and legally grab it from their website. Now this was before
Halo MCC came out, so I'm sure it's illegal now. But years ago it certainly wasn't. So I figure any delisted games are fair game to grab.
Previous
Forza series games on PC were Microsoft Store only. Do you know how hard it is to get a community demo of a UWP game working? I certainly never could. I tried very hard with
Forza Motorsport 7. That's a game I literally can NOT buy for PC even if I wanted to, because it is NOT sold for sale
anywhere. But UWP games are just such a f*cking pain in the @ss. People complain about Denuvo and sh1t, but Microsoft's UWP nonsense has been some of the most effective DRM I've seen to date. But yeah,
Forza Horizon 4 getting delisted is less of an issue, cuz it was available on Steam when it was sold.
Racing games, like fighting games, are games where one
should use a community demo by principle, on account of their extreme DLC trains. And course, all this license-based delisting crap. It happens often with racing games, or games that use licensed music. I felt it was never much of an issue before, cuz on PC you had community demos, and on console well you also had community demos if you modded the system.
Well, at least on the Sony, Microsoft, Steam, and GOG platforms, you can always re-download a delisted game you've already purchased. Not sure how the other platforms roll. But for people who are always worried about losing their legal digital libraries, don't worry, the community library probably already has that game covered.
