Another upcoming GOG.com delisting announced this week will see Spectrum Holobyte’s Falcon Collection soaring off into the sunset on April 27th at 3pm UTC (11am EST) due to a “change of licensing rights”.
We’d like to inform you that, due to the change of licensing rights, Falcon Collection will be delisted from our catalog on Thursday, April 27th, 3 PM UTC. For everyone who purchased the title prior to delisting, it will remain in their GOG library.
GOG.com Announcement – April 20, 2023
The Falcon Collection is the only title from Spectrum Holobyte on GOG.com but the included titles — Falcon, Falcon A.T., Falcon Gold, and Falcon 4.0 — are also available as a bundle and individually on Steam. Since licensing is behind the delisting, chances are good that these four will also disappear soon on Steam, if not on April 27th alongside the GOG.com version.
I haven’t had time to dig into it further but this may be the beginning of more widespread delistings for some classic games. Atari announced on April 19th that they had acquired a “deep catalog” of “more than 100 PC and console titles from the 80s and 90s” from publishers including Accolade, Infogrames, and Microprose. Spectrum Holobyte was a long-time subsidiary of Microprose until 2018 when it was purchased by industry veteran David Lagettie and iEntertainment Network.
It seems that the licensing of the existing digital releases of the Falcon titles requires some re-negotiation and could return pretty quickly with updated copyright info. However, it’s just as likely that they’ll be gone for quite a while as Atari sorts out its new catalog of titles and either relists them or offers new releases in the future.
For now we only know that the Falcon Collection is leaving GOG.com for certain, so grab it there if interested. Thanks to Auster for submitting the news, I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and we’ll have a page up on the site later.