This is all courtesy of user willooi over at neogaf:

Just a heads up to San Andreas owners on Steam:

The latest update, coinciding somewhat with the recent 360 re-release, adds native controller support but takes away a lot more.

Highly recommend manually stopping it if you can, as many iconic songs are now gone due to licence expiry purposes (full list below), and older save files may also be affected. More details here (thanks Im_Special).

- Adds support for XInput controllers (Xbox 360 controller)

- Makes "Steering with Mouse" enabled by default

- Removes several songs for all owners

- Removes several resolution options, including 1920x1080 (This was broken in the original version, then fixed in an update - now unfixed with this latest update)

- Loading a game save from the original version just starts a new game

- Occasional crashes during car explosions if another monitor is attached

PLAYBACK FM

"Critical Beatdown"

K-DST

"Running Down A Dream"

"Woman To Woman"

Bounce FM

"You Dropped A Bomb On Me"

"Yum Yum"

"Running Away"

Radio Los Santos

"I Don't Give A f*ck"

"Express Yourself"

Radio X

"Killing in the Name of"

"Hellraiser"

K-Jah West

"Ring My Bell"

"Don't Let It Go To Your Head"

Master Sounds 98.3

"Express Yourself"

"Rock Creek Park"

"Grunt"

"Soul Power '74"

"The Payback"

Controller support!!!! finally. the PC version is the definitive one now. The draw distance on the 360 HD version still looked like crap compared to the PC. As for the missing songs. well i you could totally add those back in. If u get the original .wav file and replace that with the new one it will have all the original songs. (wild guess but dont see why it wouldnt work) or you could just put those in the MP3 station that i think is in the PC version. Im going to try and add the old .wavs or what ever format it is to the new version and ill get back to you guys with a result.

Welp, I figured it would break saves but I hoped against hope. Guess I'll go back to launching it outside Steam to avoid the update. Started a playthrough in mid-October and have already got mods for 1080p and XInput working. I've reached Las Venturas and I see nothing here worthwhile to restart 20-some hours of progress.

Update: Launched my game directly from the folder, checked the radio and "Critical Beatdown" was playing. As it should be. You can't break my game, Rockstar. Fuck tha police!

That sucks pretty bad. The last time they did this with Vice City anyone who bought it before the change got to keep the music.

I'm glad I never picked this up. I was interested at first but with the removal of 17 songs after people bought this game and basically deleting saves is just egregious.

Music licensing in general is always super dumb... But I may finally play SA now that it has native 360 controller support. I just can't do K+M with 3rd person games.

I assume they'll be kicking down everyone's doors and scraping off the sections of data with the songs on peoples PS2 disks with a small blade then?

Music licensing sucks but I hope they fix the 1920x1080 thing in another patch.

Luckily I still own a PS2 and the game. Sucks that I didn't have the Steam version installed to archive. Went to go turn off updates as suggested and saw it wasn't installed =/

I still have first run PS2 disc. I never returned or exchanged it after the Hot Coffee recall. I bought the PSN port last year. Its difficult to go back to a game that hasn't aged well visually. It wasn't meant to be seen on an LCD flat screen. Saw the Quick Look of the "HD Remastered" version. It is disappointing a game with a great legacy is brought back in a mediocre state.

Well this sucks. I was thinking of playing it again recently and now I think I'll wait and pick up a PS2 copy instead.

All hail the digital future. Seriously, if you already own the game and the files are on your computer, what the hell right does any company have to remove / disallow that content due to a licensing issue? I can understand removing it from future versions of the game that are sold, but this is ridiculous.

Publishers can have my physical media when they pry it from my cold dead hands. Or whenever publishers stop selling physical media. Whichever comes first, really.

@korwin: haha, very vivid!

They need to do some better licensing for music going forward then, because this can't be the standard going forward.

Oh damn, it updated a while ago while I was gone. I had just grabbed a load distance mod and was about to continue an old save, too. Well, this is annoying.

@spaceinsomniac: That's how Steam works. You don't own the game or those files, you own a license. Which is why I agree with you that I'll use physical media for as long as it's available.

@jesus_phish: Actually that's how all PC games work, whether it's on steam or not. Not sure if it was ever otherwise, bit I'be been gaming on PC a long time and for a long time I'be known that technically I don't own any game.

Running Down a Dream was my back country exploring song. Dang. I almost found bigfoot.

Happy I have this game on disk and not on Steam.

@belegorm: But if I own a physical disc which doesn't require Steams DRM, then they can't do anything about that. They can't enter my home and snap my copy of GTA:SA in half and replace it with a new one with less features.

This is on of my top reasons for buying physical, you have that version forever. I bought it on PS3 for $2.99 just for convenience sake and that does have most if not all the recently removed songs on that. I remember listening to express yourself just a few days ago while playing. I still like knowing that I own the ps2/Xbox/PC-cd version from years ago that I can always go back to. This changing stuff in games, be it minor can really change an experience. It kind of stinks to tell you the truth.

How do I get around this?

@jesus_phish: I feel like I have more chances of losing my discs through breaking, scratching them, getting them lost, or simply having them buried under boxes of other games, than I do of Steam destroying my games somehow. It's shitty in this example here, but fortunately I've never cared for any of the GTA games that much so I don't even have SA.

That's probably why they removed that Xbox originals version from the Xbox Live Marketplace, huh? In any case, I'm glad that I have both that version on my Xbox, and a physical copy of the PC version... even if that second release that gets rid of modding, but thank goodness for that community downgrade patch.

I'm still sad that they removed Killing in the Name. I played through that (dreadful) re-release on 360 and it did not feel the same without Zack de la Rocha yelling in my face.

This just shows how amazing the All Digital Future is! Now the publisher can just take shit out at anytime! And there's nothing you can do about it!

And they can't do that with Steam either... Just set your game to not update. You don't own anything on the discs you have, you're still just licensing it, it's no different to keeping a game installed on a harddrive/having a backup.

@alexw00d: You can't set games to not update on Steam anymore. You can set it to "keep up to date" "only update when I launch" or "prioritize this game to update before others". There's no "do no't update" option now. Apparently a loop around fix is to hope it hasn't already updated and then only launch the game via the .exe in the game folder and never directly through steam after setting it to "only update when I launch".

Oh shit, that came alone quietly.