In a slow trend that needs to stop, two more games have been pulled from the Xbox Live Arcade. Doom, an online port of id’s classic FPS joins Double D Dodgeball as the latest games to get the de-listing treatment. Rumors state that Doom’s de-listing is because of a Zenimax deal with id, and the game was published by Activision. This was apparently not the case with Doom II, which was released earlier in 2010.
As for Double D Dodgeball, who knows?
All of this shows a huge problem with digital content, the transferring of rights occurring with regularity, and games meeting their end far sooner than they should. With physical copies, this doesn’t happen, and preservation becomes far easier. Obscure titles like Double D Dodgeball are easily lost in the midst of higher profile releases, a tragedy regardless of the game’s quality. There should be a push towards preserving each and every release, and pulling them from a store with limitless copies is absurd.
