Three months after 14 Disney games were delisted from Steam without warning, the scythe has returned to cut down a few more. As caught by the roving eye of SteamDB, 15 more games under (some form of) the Disney brand were summarily delisted from the Steam store earlier today. Here's the full list:
- Disney High School Musical 3: Senior Year Dance
- Disney•Pixar Brave: The Video Game
- Disney Bolt
- Disney's Treasure Planet: Battle of Procyon
- Disney Alice in Wonderland
- Disney's Chicken Little
- Disney Tangled
- Disney G-Force
- Disney Universe
- Disney Princess: My Fairytale Adventure
- Disney Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End
- Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier (an odd one out, for reasons I'll go into)
- Star Wars: Rebellion
- Star Wars: Dark Forces (Classic, 1995)
- Outlaws + A Handful of Missions (Classic, 1997)
My suspicion is that licensing issues are at play, but I've reached out to Disney to ask why these delistings have happened, and I'll update this piece if I hear back.
The original Dark Forces and Outlaws—both of which have received Nightdive remasters—might be missed by the odd fan who never bothered to replace their CD versions with a Steam copy, but for the most part? I imagine most of the people who will ever want these games already have them.
The odd one out, like I said, is Planet of the Apes. It's the only game in the list not to have "Disney" in its publisher box on the store page, it was released in 2018, and it got an update in June last year. It falls under the 20th Century Games rubric, the publishing arm of the Disney-owned 20th Century Fox. Where most of the games in this list feel like they might simply be lost to time in their Steam form, I'd be surprised if Planet of the Apes, with its oh-so-recent update and relatively recent release, was left to languish.
Anyway, here's the part where I engage in what we in the trade call baseless speculation. Remember Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic, and how Epic is reportedly cooking up a bunch of Disney games, including an extraction shooter? Perhaps a fruit of this blossoming partnership will be Disney games becoming Epic Games Store exclusives. Don't shoot the messenger.
