GOG has made a surprise announcement, that seems like it’s bad news for fans of the video game franchise The Suffering, unless it hints at something else.
The Suffering and The Suffering: Ties That Bind are horror themed action shooter games, with survival gameplay elements, an unreliable narrator theme, and multiple endings. They revolve around Torque, a man sentenced to death for murdering his family, though he has no memory of it. Torque faces supernatural enemies while fighting to keep his own sanity, and regain his memories.
These games came to Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. While they aren’t well remembered today, they hold historical significance for being one of the most high profile AAAs that came with Mature 17+ ratings from the ESRB. Those ratings are even listed on the ESRB website today.
Yesterday, GOG Team member king_kunat posted this on the GOG forums:
“Hey everyone! As much as I hate posting such information, we have an upcoming delisting.
Per the publisher’s request both The Suffering (https://www.gog.com/game/the_suffering) and The Suffering: Ties That Bind (https://www.gog.com/game/the_suffering_ties_that_bind) will leave our store on September 1st (no exact hour yet).
Grab the game before that if you’re interested. And as always, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
The Suffering games may not exactly be hidden gems, with reviews falling between the 70s to 80s range. While gamers are used to mature themes and gratuitous violence in video games today, they were not really a major influence in normalizing that. There are no lack of tentpole AAAs that have normalized these as tropes for games made for adults, such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. But then, that certainly points to how important it would be for gamers to get their copies of this game if they want it.
While we don’t know why Warner Bros. has chosen to delist this game, there are several possibilities. For one, they may be selling the franchise wholesale. As reported by PCGamesN just two months ago, the original Delta Force games were delisted from GOG prior to Team Jade’s Delta Force going public. If that is the case, then it would be up to the new owners of the IP to decide to bring these games back or not.
Another possibility is that Warner Bros. could be planning a reboot themselves. While this may seem contradictory, they may feel that they have to remove the older games from circulation to make the new game more successful. But truthfully, since it’s David Zaslav’s company we’re talking about here, who knows? If it’s another situation where the line of thinking is they won’t have to pay creatives if they stop selling those products, it’s likely to backfire and harm them even more instead. If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll reconsider, but it would depend on what the exact reason for this delisting is.
