Sega has suddenly announced that 60 classic games from its back catalog are about to be delisted from Steam. Now, it's not as if you'll be lacking for ways to play, say, Streets of Rage after these versions of the games go down, but the delistings are notable for a few reasons, including the fact that these are some of the only legally purchasable classic game ROMs you'll find anywhere on the internet.
The full list of games that are being taken down is available on Sega's official support site, which also confirms that they'll be removed on 11:59pm PT on December 6. The list includes a few Dreamcast ports alongside the Sega Genesis Classics collection, which encompass a total of 60 games on Steam. We're talking stuff like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and Phantasy Star IV - all bonafide classics of the 16-bit era.
While on consoles this collection is, as the name suggests, a collection - and it's being delisted on Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation too - on Steam each Genesis game is available separately, with most of them selling for $0.99. The emulator bundled with the games isn't a particularly great one, though it does have nice features like Steam Workshop support letting you download your own ROM hacks.
But the real reason to buy these games is that once you install them, you can just browse to that install filter and find a ROM file to use any way you like - no encrypted files to datamine or DRM to bypass. Just raw ROM files that you've legally purchased. That means you can drop those ROMs into your emulator of choice and play them however you want, totally legally. Short of getting hold of a USB cartridge reader and dumping games yourself, it's almost impossible to get ahold of raw ROMs without pirating them, which makes this collection particularly notable among retro rereleases on PC.
The question is why Sega has chosen to suddenly delist these games now. The titles were released between 2010 and 2012, so they've all been available for well over a decade without issue. Three individual games from the collection were, however, delisted in 2022. The whole Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy was removed just before the launch of Sonic Origins, a series-specific package that was maligned by its own developers.
We know Sega has big plans for old IP with revivals of plenty of classic games in the works, and it's possible the company is planning some sort of new classic collection that would replace this one in the near future. December 7, the day after these games go down, will mark the one-year anniversary of Sega's big Power Surge reveal, so the timing's certainly conspicuous. Let's just hope whatever's to come gives these classics the treatment they deserve.
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