CarrionCrow: It's the lack of communication that bugs me.
I don't expect GOG to leave themselves open to some kind of legal action by keeping a game up when they aren't supposed to, but I'm looking at it like this -
It's a weekday. It's not a holiday. There's no mention at all of it being pulled by anyone official.
GOG has a really shitty habit of not communicating with customers a fair bit of the time.
adaliabooks: It does suck when games get removed like this, but I suppose it's possibly GoG didn't know till the last moment. Nothing would surprise me if they literally got an email today saying the game had to be down today (it's the kind of shit we deal with all the time, it's amazing how few business are run by people with any kind of professionalism).
That being said, GoG aren't known for being very forthcoming with info so who knows?
I'd never heard of the game before, what was it?
Horror-based adventure game. Hadn't heard of it before GOG, but it looked interesting. Had it on my list til it got wiped.
And yes, you're right, the people with the rights could've hit them at the last minute.
It's just annoying that no one could take five minutes and say,
"Hey, everyone. We're very sorry to have to announce this, but due to legal issues, we were forced to pull Scratches Director's Cut from the catalog.
We try our best to give our customers a chance to pick up such titles, but sometimes these things happen on the spur of the moment, so we were unable to put out a notice before we had to remove it.
Our apologies for any inconvenience this might cause.
We always want our loyal GOG customers to have every chance possible to pick up good DRM-free games with good prices.
As always, everyone who's already bought it will be able to download it, and we will of course do everything possible to make sure it's back here for people to check out and enjoy as soon as possible."
That's what, three or four minutes of typing stuff off the top of my head?
It's not hard.
Rule one - always assume that someone will be interested, even if the info seems like it pertains to some obscure game that no one gives a damn about.