In a move sure to ring bells for fans of the inside story on the digital video game business, DC League of Super-Pets: The Adventures of Krypto and Ace has been removed from all major digital retailers, as noted by True Achievements. The removal, as verified by publisher PHL Collective on Friday, June 27, has the game no longer up for sale via retailers like Steam, the PlayStation Store, and Microsoft’s Xbox digital storefront.
This pull is because of the cancellation of the game publisher’s licensing deal with the online stores. Such an event does not occur seldom in the business, especially for games that have direct association with movie releases, when intellectual properties and contractual time periods usually dictate access. A rail-shooter, it released during summer of 2022 connected to the animated DC League of Super-Pets film as an interactive spin-off to the film story.
Who among them set out on this cyber adventure assumed the identities of Krypto the Superdog and Ace the Bat-Hound, two veteran experts of the DC universe’s animal legion. Their mission was to protect Metropolis from the sinister plots of the notorious Lex Luthor and his robotic cohorts, the LexBots. Though the game itself perhaps didn’t receive the critic support it was worthy of or have the huge player base, its removal further serves to draw attention to the temporal nature of digital ownership and access in a more and more casual, licensed content-controlled era. For consumers and owners of the property, the practice is to highlight obtaining physical copies where available, or digital copies within their active-use window, to preserve access to stand-alone titles. The industry has historically had to contend with the repercussions of such withdrawals, and each one an event of the changing game preservation landscape.
