Gamers of Rockstar’s series Grand Theft Auto (GTA), you are forewarned that the next upcoming update to your GTA IV will delete a bunch of in-game songs. As the license for some of the soundtrack has expired.
The deletion of GTA IV songs will reportedly happen on the game’s 10 anniversary (April 29). Rockstar has not confirmed the specific list of songs whose license has expired; if anything, the game publisher has remained mum about the whole thing.
Then again, this is not the first time Rockstar has remained mum over such a serious development on its GTA series. The same happened to the GTA Vice City, which mysteriously disappeared from Steam for a short period, and even the GTA San Andreas got a stealthy updated removing some songs.
This development is part of the negative sides of the digital era we are living in, digital content gets easily spread but without licensing they can be easily removed at a moment’s notice. The bad thing with Rockstar is the silent treatment it is giving players. There was no notification or any sort of warning when a bunch of tunes were pulled off San Andreas, just like there is no any notification whatsoever that some songs will be pulled off GTA IV.
This news was leaked out by some contacts working at Rockstar, but there has been no official communication from the company about the same. Gamers are also not sure if physical copies of the games will be affected once they go online to receive the regular security patches.
Ironically, gamers on PS3 will get messages prior to the songs in GTA IV are removed. Those messages will also contain codes for the songs to be axed; whether that is legal or not, that remains to be seen. That said, the next time you go online on your gaming console or PC, you might want to disable automatic update lest the game fetches for the latest update and deletes the songs.