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Zkuq 4 days ago
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SanAndreasX said:
Zkuq said:

Without even playing any of the games in the series (yet) I can already confidently say that Larry is very tame compared to the stuff some storefronts, e.g. Steam, allow. You can have straight up fetish porn games on Steam no problem.

Here's what the scenario is.

In 2009, Activision, which acquired the IP when it acquired all of Sierra On-Line's other assets, sold the rights to the IP to Codemasters, who published Box Office Bust and licensed the IP out to Replay Games (LSL: Reloaded) and Assemble Entertainment (the Wet Dreams duology). Activision wanted nothing to do with the IP.

In 2021, Codemasters was acquired by Electronic Arts, which made EA the owner of LSL. EA also wanted nothing to do with the IP. I've also read that EA went on a spree of scrubbing a lot of the stuff Codemasters did that wasn't related to LSL. The de-listing of Larry games on Steam happened while EA was still a publicly traded corporation.

In 2026, EA was acquired and taken private by the Saudis. You can probably guess how they would view the IP.

It has been brought up again and again that Larry is really quite tame compared to the outright porn that is regularly published on Steam (that payment providers are now pressuring Steam to delist). Honestly, there were far more explicit games even in 1987. But I doubt that matters to EA's current management, or their new owners.  EA owns a lot of legacy IP that they just sit on. Richard Garriott has been trying to get Ultima back for 20 years, and he's now trying to use a loophole in US copyright law that supposedly says that the original authors can reclaim IP from a copyright holder after 35 years. When was the last time we've seen a Command and Conquer? Red Alert 3?

I bought LSL Reloaded for iOS in 2015. It has been delisted from the App Store, and I can no longer download it since it has not been updated for current Apple devices. So it's gone for good from there. Same situation on Android. I did buy LSL Reloaded from GOG a couple of years ago. Supposedly, GOG has a different licensing deal for LSL, but who knows how long that will last.

Al Lowe retired for good after LSL Reloaded. Jan Rabson (Larry's voice ever since Larry was first voice all the way up to WDDT) died in 2022. So there's really not much advocacy for LSL going on there. 

Thanks, that was very informative. A shame about the Saudis, now even more so than when stuff like this was just a concern. Of course I can't imagine that being the known reason even now, but it does seem very plausible. Another explanation would be simplifying their business a bit, but I don't think I've heard about any other EA-owned franchises being hit like this, so that doesn't seem very likely.