Absolutely, any games that use 3rd party IP have to deal with this too. Many people, myself included would love to see The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth game series from EA here on GOG for example, but the chances of that happening are close to zero ever because EA stopped selling and supporting that highly popular game many years ago and don't even sell it in their own store. They no longer have the rights to make or sell video games with Lord of the Rings trademarks and other IP, and even if they did they'd probably use it for creating new games not trying to relicense various IP to bring old games back.

This is par for the course for games based on movies, TV shows, sports idols and other 3rd party IP sadly. Really sucks because a lot of awesome games go to the graveyard permanently because of it. It's a real shame because there are a lot of games out there also that use 3rd party IP that have very long lifespans and get kept alive too. The multitude of Star Wars games for example, but then they are mostly published by the owner of the movie IP these days anyway.

But you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Games like this go to the grave after a few years and can't be brought back easily due to legal issues.

No. No it wasn't. :P

No, I had thought EA pulled digital distribution of Madden 2008 online presumably due to expiration of certain old licensed elements. Generally they only maintain official distribution of NFL and other sport licensed titles for a few years. This should also apply to 2007. However it seems you possbily can still get 2008, see below, although I am sure this was removed from Amazon back shortly after when I got it at the time. This. They get pulled all the time after their license agreement expires. A great bulk of "abandonware" are licensed IP's and other properties. No, as I mentioned that is 2008. I have it on Amazon digital download and in Origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madden_NFL_08

If you want it, you can buy it DRM free too, but it will probably never be on GOG.
https://smile.amazon.com/Electronic-Arts-70301-Madden-Download/dp/B007XXEG5C

Lol, I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who really liked that film :) It was fun!

Everyone including tinyE knows that EA is a publisher on GOG with a catalogue of DRM-free games. When people say that EA doesn't support DRM-free gaming or GOG, what they're really saying is not "I'm ignorant and didn't know that EA actually has a bunch of DRM-free games here" but rather they are saying "Yeah, EA has a couple dozen ancient games here, but they do not release any NEW games here made in recent years because they strongly favour DRM on those games and strongly favour releasing their games increasingly exclusively on Origin." or words that more or less boil down to that.

Even though both EA and Ubisoft technically have a partnership with GOG and both have games here in the store, neither of them foster that relationship with new releases nor even 1/2/5 year old releases. They only release games here that are 10/15/20 years old as a sort of token release, not in a way that they embrace the GOG.com DRM-free model. Even if they released 10 games here in the next few months that were 15 years old, it wont change that. But then they wont likely do that either because they consider gamers like us "niche" and not worth their time, energy and resources.

Of course, they want to promote their own Uplay and Origin platforms. I'm surprised that Ubisoft didn't pull out of Steam too like EA did.

It wasn't awful, it was okay.

Yeah, that doesn't bother me overly. I'd prefer to get their games on Steam than on Origin or Uplay, but both EA and Ubisoft are on my dead-to-me list which means I wont buy any of their games on any platform period except DRM-free on GOG. So the only way I get EA or Ubisoft games is through a free promo or giveaway or similar, of which I'm happy to play free games even with DRM so long as I didn't pay money to have that experience. I'm forgiving about DRM when it is free. So I do have Origin and Uplay installed, but I rarely use them and only to play the couple dozen free games I own on them. If they want to promote on their platforms, that's fine by me, I'll promote other companies games on GOG and Steam instead. :)

Ummmm...

I just had a massive catastrophe beta testing games which ended up screwing up keyboard input, killing programs, causing data loss, killing explorer primary process that runs the Windows desktop, and eventually auto-rebooting the computer. I believe I saw a window with that in it while that was going on. No idea how that could have been posted twice, but lots of crazy shit just happened. Pretty upset about it too. :/

Ouch. That was brutal.

Indeed, but it's a risk that comes along with beta testing. :) Needless to say, that particular game is officially removed from the list of games I'm willing to test now, along with its two brethren. 497'ish other ones still on the list though. :)

Ty. Up voted it.
You're right. I meant 2008. :)