Rockstar has removed GTA IV from Steam

My question for long time Steam users is that if it is the same as PlayStation in the sense that in PlayStation if a game gets removed from the PSN you can still download it any time after, as long as you already bought it before they took it down, so I wonder if Steam is the same way.

I honestly don't know. I've been curious about this myself actually, since none of the games I've bought on Steam have ever been removed at any point.

Your best bet for an accurate answer is Cervantes ; he's the residential expert on all things Steam.

So even after a game has been removed from Steam, people who bought it can uninstall it and then re-install it, despite it not being available? I wonder how that works.

Also, Does GTA IV's removal from digital stores mean that all of its epic mods will never be able to function again? I vividly remember how huge GTA IV's modding scene was when it first came out for PC in 2009 or 2010. Games for Windows Live didn't discourage modders from doing the impossible with the game's engine. It's sad to think that all of that amazing work they did might be lost forever now that this version of GTA IV is gone for good.

When it's removed from sale, it's just the store page that is taken down - the game is still on Steam servers. In some cases, you might even be able to still buy the game: if the publisher was selling, for example, serial codes to activate the game on Steam, those still work. So those "physical copies" that are only a box with a Steam code inside are a way to get a game that is not being sold on Steam itself anymore.

About the mods, they should still work normally for people who have GTA IV, but if Rockstar updates the game to resell it later, it's possible that some of them might break. A more responsible publisher would probably create a new version of the game to sell instead of updating the old one (Dark Souls, Skyrim, Company of Heroes and various others did that), so whoever had already the old version would still have its mods working normally. The best developers give the new version for free, so you get both the original and new on your account (I got the "remastered"/updated versions of Bioshock, Company of Heroes, Darksiders and a few others), while other publishers won't care and you won't get the updated release unless you buy it, which sucks because you're paying the price of a new game for what is usually a minor update they should've done in the first place and sometimes even leave the game worse than the original (Skyrim and Dark Souls).

In Rockstar's case? I'm guessing they will just update the game itself (instead of creating a new remastered/updated version), as that's what they did to previous GTAs. In their case, this is a terrible solution, because they might have lost the music licenses and, when they update the game, they take out or replace some of the licensed music from copies of the game that they have already sold, which is absurdly illegal under most countries' consumer laws (removing marketed features from a product that you already sold to the consumer). Once a license expires, a publisher has to remove licensed content from new copies of a product that they intend to sell, but removing them from already sold games is something that I never heard of - that's scummy as hell. My Steam copy of San Andreas was affected by this: Rockstar took out some of its original music, that's why I don't buy Rockstar games anymore (and if I ever do, it will be a physical copy that they can't mess with).

Of course, fans have created mods for San Andreas that restore the missing music, but besides the legality of these mods (since the fans who created them don't have the license to distribute those songs), it still doesn't change the fact that Rockstar acted illegally in the first place. And this all happened because, instead of selling a new version without the expired licenses, Rockstar went the lazy way and just updated the copy already available on Steam.

stratogustav - Good to know about PSN, it seems P.T. being taken down was just Konami's pettiness against Kojima.

About Windows 10, the biggest reason for older physical PC games to not work on it is because of the DRM programs that came with them - Windows 10 brought new protections that don't allow programs to mess with its core as much as previous Windows versions, and DRMs, by their nature, were very intrusive. Since those DRMs weren't used in the digital/Steam versions of those games, as they didn't make sense (they were meant to guarantee that the game's original CD/DVD was on your drive), almost all the games that were sold on Steam since the 2000s still work normally. For the few exceptions that don't and won't be updated, I guess you're right, they probably go the same way of licensed games.

That is exactly what I meant by "go the same way of licensed games". Some of them probably stop being sold on Steam, but you can still download them if they were already bought. My guess is that Steam would even keep selling most of them, as there are a lot of people that use Steam on Windows 7, 8, Linux or other OS in which those games might still work (I'm guessing they would just put up a disclaimer on the store page or something).

That said, I can't remember any cases of games that stopped being sold on Steam especifically because of incompatibility with Windows 10, it must be a really rare situation.

In conclusion: once you buy a game on Steam, it will always be on your library to download and play, no matter expired licenses or incompatibilities with a specific OS.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21143685/gta-iv-steam-windows-live-multiplayer-complete-edition-liberty-city-date

Rockstar announced today that GTA IV Complete Edition is going to replace GTA IV and its expansion, Episodes from Liberty City, on Steam, which will contain both those games but not without some major omissions:

-No multiplayer (which probably means no more LAN support, either one of the PC ports only exclusive features)
-No leaderboards
-A crap-ton of OST from three different radio channels that will be gutted out of the game entirely

HOWEVER, there is one other omission that players probably won't miss at all:

-No Games for Windows Live!

People who already own the Steam versions of either GTA IV, its expansions or both as a bundle will be forcebly upgraded to GTA IV Complete Edition, so tough luck if you enjoyed playing the multiplayer mode.

I've been playing Rockstar titles for nearly two decades now and I personally wouldn't rank them among the worst publishers since they've never done anything that upset me. BUT that might be because I only play (and have only played) the console versions of their games. If I had bought Bully or GTA IV for the PC I probably would've felt violated/insulted as a customer, like many other people did.

The removal of radio stations in GTA games doesn't bother me since I never use the radio in the games, but I can understand why other people would be pissed over that. It really sucks that the multiplayer is going away though (IV's multiplayer was awesome), and at this point I've lost hope of Rockstar ever adding exclusive features like level editors and console commands to their PC ports. I guess was a fool for ever praying for that in a multiplat port.

I wonder if Games For Windows Live removal will improve the game's optimization?