Recently, EA suddenly removed several classic games from Steam, but did not issue any announcement. In 2021, EA acquired the developer Codemasters at a high price of US$1.2 billion. Now, as a subsidiary of EA, Codemasters has recently had a number of games removed from Steam. These are all classic games developed and published by Codemasters before the acquisition.
A total of six games including "Curse", "Hospital Tycoon", "Maelstrom", "Rise of the Argonauts", "Speed Toys" and "Operation Flashpoint" were directly removed from the shelves by EA. The last two games were developed by Codemasters, and the others were games published by Codemasters.
Now, you get an "app_retired_publisher_request" error when you try to access them on Steam. All the games that were removed from the shelves previously existed on the dream list of games that GOG players want to keep, which also means that players have a need to keep these games.
Coincidentally, the previous incident of Nintendo removing games from the NSO membership library for the first time also caused many players to worry about the problem of handling old games on digital platforms.
Things like this bring to our attention the serious issue of game preservation, after all, low sales shouldn't cause a game to disappear forever. In addition, EA has not responded to this matter, and EA has recently been in a difficult position due to some in-app purchases and the failure of "Dragon Age: Shadowkeep", which will only make EA's status in the hearts of fans even worse.