Microsoft has announced that the original Forza Horizon will reach "End of Life" status on October 20, which means it will be de-listed. I am not sure if this also means the online will be shut down, but you won't be able to buy the game digitally after that (though you will be able to re-download and play it, of course.)

While most people probably have a digital copy of FH1 through Games With Gold at this point, the DLC is trickier. If there's a piece of DLC you wanted, best to grab it now. If you have the season pass you need to make sure you have downloaded everything you are entitled to, because it's one of those badly designed season passes where owning it doesn't grant you everything you're entitled to within the Xbox system; you need to go in manually and download it all from within the game (or the Xbox store, though the web-store isn't working for me to do this right now.)

I'm pretty disappointed that Microsoft is doing this, though I assume it just relates to licensing deals and I do understand that getting all the car and music licenses for Forza Horizon must be a truly herculean task. They also made the game backwards compatible and offered it on GWG, and gave us nearly a month's warning about the delisting (though it is buried in a FH3 news update) so it's hard to be too angry, but as someone who cares about games preservation and has invested in the digital 'future' this kind of thing is very frustrating.

So tag everything you want because it's going away in less than a month.

How many other digital versions of games have disappeared from the Microsoft/Sony store for licensing reasons like this (if that is what's happening)? The only instance I was aware of were some games with the Marvel/Disney license since that seems so mercurial given that Disney seems to have no interest in reupping any old licensing deals.

I guess I'm used to an EA Trax situation where when you sign a music track on with EA, EA owns the rights to use that song in video games quite flexibly and for a long time, it seems.

There are lots of lists of delisted games out there, and while they generally don't tell us why a title is delisted it's usually pretty easy to figure out. I think the most prominent and obvious examples are Outrun Online Arcade and Sega Rally Online Arcade. Sega is still a going concern (games sometimes get delisted when rights get weird) and Sega doesn't generally pull games off marketplaces arbitrarily, so it stands to reason that the loss of car licenses are the reason these games were delisted. The same is likely true of Afterburner Climax, a very fun game that likely got delisted when Sega lost the plane licenses.

There are of course other examples. Turtles in Time Reshelled was delisted (presumably for the TMNT license) and I think the Battlestar Galactica game went down for similar reasons.

Licensing is complicated and difficult. You can license things in perpetuity or for only a few years, it depends on what the license holder wants to do (and how much the licensee wants to pay.) You'd think that Microsoft, being a big rich company, would license for long periods of time, but there are a ton of licensees in a Forza game so it stands to reason that some may not have wanted to grant perpetual licenses or may have demanded exorbitant amounts of money for them.

I don't think there's another reasonable explanation for why this is happening. You might argue they don't want to compete with their shiny new Forza Horizon 3 game, but then why make Forza Horizon 1 backwards compatible AND give away millions of copies with Games With Gold. This is a classic "We're losing the license so let's extract every final bit of value we can" move. It's similar to Ducktales Remastered, which was made backwards compatible and offered on sale lots of places right before the license expired.

Makes me think about the future of car game preservation in general. Doesn't seem good.

Wow, that's kinda crazy. So the game/DLC will always show up in your download history even though it will be removed from the marketplace?

Licensing laws are really backwards and need an overhaul for video games. There have been cases where developers can't even patch their games because the license ran out.

That's how this kind of thing generally works. You can re-download whatever you own a license for but you can't buy any new stuff (So any DLC you don't own you won't be able to purchase.) I'm not sure how this will affect backwards compatibility if they ever make an Xbox 2 though. I believe that BC games on Xbox One are still downloadable normally, and since Scorpio is still Xbox One you should be able to get the game there, but who knows how all this stuff will work going forward.

It's frustrating because it's unclear to me what license holders gain by pulling games off of marketplace. Is there any value to a car manufacturer to not having a digital version of one of its cars purchasable in an old video game? I can't find it. If anything video game presences ADD value for car manufacturers. I know that I get a positive perspective towards an automaker when I use one of their cars in a game and I enjoy it and grow attached to it.

But it's the same for Marvel vs Capcom. What benefit did Marvel gain from pulling those games from digital distribution and not letting them become BC? Are people going to buy more current Marvel products because they can't play the old ones? I know I don't work that way, and a lot of games makers don't seem to think that way either since they give away older games (on Origin or XBL or whatever) in advance of the new games coming out, which I think is generally the right strategy. I wouldn't be buying Gears of War 4 if Microsoft hadn't made the whole previous saga easily accessible and cheap on Xbox One, but MS did so I am going to buy the next game, not out of 'loyalty' but because I've come to enjoy the gameplay and atmosphere of Gears games.

But it may just be rights based hostage taking. They think they can force Capcom or whoever to pony up if they threaten to delist the games, and then Capcom balks at the price, and everybody loses.

The 360 Project Gotham games are non-existent on Xbox.com. There's a PGR4 trailer listed, but that's it. Thankfully I still have my discs, but I'd LOVE to see those games on back combat. I still remember the PGR3 trailer leaving me with a sense of awe, similar to Forza trailers now.

I was actually looking at getting FH1 after I saw the FH3 quick look. I have not have gold in years so I have not gotten in that way. In 2012 I switched from 360 to PS3 almost exclusivly because I got tired of shooters and wanted to play more Japanese games and since then it has only been PS Plus.

Things like this makes me worry about how long we will be able to play our games that are not on discs. The vast majority of my PS3 and Vita games are downloads. At some point it is going to dissapear because it makes no sense for them to let you download a PS3 game 20 years from now. The question is how long they will allow people to download titles for 360 and PS3 which are the first generation of consoles where people have downloaded titles. I can still play my Dreamcast but it is not easy to download the DLC (yes some DC games had a primitive form of DLC like a new weapon in Skies of Arcadia for example). For a console like the 360 or PS3 they will be very limited once they shut down the online part. even if you have the discs you can't get the patches and DLC. Many games don't even come out on disc anymore especially here in Europe. On Vita only a handful of games get physical copies here. The situation is better in the US but still some comes are downloads only.

How hard is it to patch in the background music volume slider to 0%?

Wow. Very surprising seeing a first-party game get delisted, but I suppose a racing game with both licensed cars and music would be one of the most likely to face the sort of issues that typically lead to this.

Thankfully the two sequels are still out there (as well as used disc copies of the original), so Forza Horizon isn't totally lost to the ether for people late to the party in the same way as stuff like After Burner Climax and OutRun Online Arcade.

That being said, use of the term EOL ("end of life") in the announcement does make me question if it actually is a licensing issue. Whenever I've seen the term EOL used in the past, it's typically been a deliberate decision on the part of the manufacturer to cease production/support for an older product.

Licensing laws themselves are relatively flexible, it's the individual contracts that cause issues. You can see why in many cases short term licenses make sense (you may not want Activision making Spider-Man games in five years, and the license becomes more valuable to sell to someone else if you can get the Activision games off of digital marketplaces) and there are many games that clearly have perpetual licenses of some sort or another (think of all the old games with licensed soundtracks you can still get digitally.)

There's also the fact that at the time of Forza Horizon's release $60 games were almost exclusively sold on disc. I don't even think FH1 launched with a digital version, I think that was added later. Discs don't have the same issue as digital because once a disc is printed and sold into retail channels it can be sold (new or used) for many years later. Discs generally go out of print for age or lack of demand, not licensing issues.

The real issue here is that the people making the licenses don't have much incentive to worry about things 4 years down the line. They probably thought that FH1 would do almost all its sales in 2012/2013 (almost certainly true if you don't count GWG) and then be available for awhile after that, but by 2016 people would have moved to the next Xbox and not care about a four year old driving game. And in general I think this is correct. It's only enthusiasts who really care about this kind of thing.

The late decision to add backwards compatibility complicates thing in general, but honestly FH1s commercial life is basically over, and the people who bought the game can still play it, so this is only an issue for the very small number of people who care about preservation. And to be fair, FH1 is not a digital title, so there are at least hundreds of thousands of discs still out there for people who want to play it.

@shindig said:

I assume this is a joke but if the issue is music (and it's probably cars) A) the audio files would still be there so this wouldn't fix the legal issue and B) the millions of people who own current copies would not be happy to find their games suddenly crippled with no background music.

It's possible, but since when do companies pull digital versions of games off their stores for "EOL" reasons? Microsoft has many, many, older games still available for digital purchase, so this would be pretty inconsistent of them. Also, if you're getting ready to discontinue something just to discontinue it it seems weird to give millions of copies away right before you do it.

That kind of behavior is, IMO, much more consistent with "We're losing the rights, let's extract all the value we can from this thing before we have to pull it."

I should note that, of course, I have no special or inside knowledge and this is all speculation and conjecture on my part. All I know is what has been released in public statements so you may well be right.

Wait a second, do ultimate edition owners not get the season pass? It says they get a $10 discount? WTF

Not to mention the entire premise of the game is a music festival.

No, the ultimate edition owners of FH3 just get the car pass (every monthly car pack for the next six months), but the expansions that are a bit more substantial and will add some new events and areas aren't included in that.

Well this dashes my hopes of them eventually doing a PC version. Luckily I have it on disc but it would have been nice to see it running at a smooth 60fps.

So can someone explain to me why a movie with licensed music in it - for instance, Pulp Fiction - can continue to be produced and sold without any of this shit happening? Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had licensed music taken out so that Rockstar could continue to sell it, this game is being removed from digital marketplaces seemingly because Microsoft can't legally sell it anymore only a few years after release because of music and car licenses, but this isn't a problem for movies? Why not? That seems really fucked up.

@justin258: The way the licensing deals work are different for movies and for games. Firstly, outside of licensed soundtracks, most companies pay to have their products in a movie, not the other way around. And if the movie was making some sort of commentary on the product they could use it without permission under fair use laws. In the case of licensed soundtracks, you are generally talking about no more than 5 songs for the whole movie, whereas a game like Forza has dozens, or even hundreds of songs. A movie studio can license 5 songs in perpetuity but a game publisher likely can't afford to do the same for 100 songs. And that doesn't even account for the fact that the 5 biggest movie studios and the five biggest music distributors are owned by the same company so in many cases they don't have to worry about licensing as they own both. For Sony and Warner Bros. this is also true of their game divisions. Warner will never lose the rights to Batman or the Danny Elfman soundtrack used in some of the games because the same company owns the comic, the soundtrack, and the game studio.

I'll be keeping an eye on the progress of 360 emulation, then. Although you'd imagine, from here on out, every Xbox branded console will come with that.

@justin258: there are plenty of examples of movies/TV shows that have different songs on the blu ray/DVD than the original versions.

Also, I'm pretty sure the later re-released versions of San Andreas or one of the GTA3 games had to have some songs removed due to licensing reasons. Forza games have a lot of licensed stuff, cars, songs, etc...

Either way, we'll never learn the real reason but at least MS gace the game out to gold members before it disappears from the store forever.

Thanks for the note, I'll try to make a point of acquiring this digitally.

To the issues involved: yeah, licensing laws around this need to change. If you license an asset to appear in a game, that should be forever. I'm moving away from physical media, so I hope this gets cleaned up at some point.

Just weeks before Forza Horizon went on sale and became a Games With Gold title, I managed to buy a new copy of the game. I think I'll keep it in the shrink wrap now...

It's for reasons mentioned in this thread that I'll never move to an all-digital future of owning games, however. I like owning my games, not just a license to them. It's terrifying to think about, but Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo can easily revoke access to your games anytime. Not that they wouldn't catch significant flak for doing so.

@boss_kowbel: And a massive class-action, forcing them to revert access to everything.

Also I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but access isn't being revoked. It's just getting delisted from the store for purchases.

I mean that's the end of games scenario. It's the great Steam piracy singularity. If Valve ever fold and don't have systems in place to ensure that the archive is available in perpetuity with a legally locked fund to keep it operating even if the company fails then it's over for games.

Millions (hundreds of millions of active monthly users) of people who paid between a little and a lot for games will find that accessing the things they legally purchased becomes impossible without piracy. At that point piracy is a moral imperative - not to support it is to steal billions in digital games from the people who have (looking at the sales skew for PC games and how even disc retail is a minnow) basically funded PC games development for at least a decade.

But a PC market where there is no trust in purchases (because this hypothetical situation is one where the big store just revoked access as it collapsed) isn't one where, with the famous Newell quote, "piracy is a service issue". Piracy is the new norm because paying for stuff doesn't mean you actually get access to it. Which would collapse the cash flowing in from purchased games. Which would wipe out many publishers and most indies. The entire market would burn for years before trust was even potentially stabilised. The talent exodus alone would take a decade to recover. And this would be truly global (unlike the US-based collapse of the early 80s).

Sony, MS, Ninty, or Valve signalling that the digital games sales system isn't really about buying games but a $60 rental market with unknown lifespans would be the end. Ok, maybe not Ninty; purchasers there likely already realise Ninty doesn't really get digital sales and you shouldn't expect them to (which is why those games are crazy-overpriced for what you're buying if you use a Ninty digital store).

@fnrslvr: No, I'm not talking about revoking access in this scenario. I'm saying that, in general, the Big Three and Steam could simply flip a switch and -- oops -- you no longer own that copy of Call of Duty, Fallout, Far Cry, what have you. It's what happened when Fallout 4 was momentarily listed as free on the Xbox One. Several people took advantage of that "deal," but Microsoft removed those copies from their libraries. I know it's not the same when you actually buy a game -- I'm just confirming that those tools exist.

The Fallout 4 example is more reversing a mistaken transaction, and I think we've all known that was possible. And Steam also revokes your access to a game when you get a refund.

So yes, it's certainly possible technologically for these companies to revoke access (not actually sure about Nintendo since their games aren't tagged to your account, just your system).

One issue that's related, though, is that if your account is banned from PSN you lose the ability to redownload games you've purchased (I think this is the same for Xbox Live.) I was temporarily banned once for disputing a charge when Sony double charged me for a purchase, even though that's what Sony customer service told me to do. I did get unbanned after about a week of talking to Sony's customer service, but I could have lost quite a few games.

I think this is a real consumer issue, and there should be rules in place to make sure that people keep stuff they've legitimately purchased, but it's a separate issue from de-listing, which is frustrating but shouldn't be illegal. Companies pull (physical) products, including games, from store shelves all the time for a variety of reasons. I don't think the law should prevent a publisher from delisting a game.