I'm slightly annoyed at how MS is handling BC Halo 1 & 2, even though the MCC is nice

Wolf 09’s cover appeared in marketing materials for XSX backwards compatibility as recently as late last year (Before being spotted and removed).

I suspect Wolf 09 is one that works just fine and has been done internally at the back compat team, they’re waiting for the go ahead to release it from whoever is holding it up. My speculation is that they could be strategically holding it back until they announce Wolf 3, kinda like how they delayed Doom 64 remaster to coincide with Doom Eternal’s release and act as a preorder incentive.

Wolfenstein 2009 is delisted everywhere, on pc/360/ps3 because it was made by raven and published by activision before the id buyout by zenimax. Quake 4 had a similar situation, but it’s now digitally available at least on pc, Wolfenstein 2009 has been delisted for a decade now, maybe activision and zenimax fought over it and nobody has the clear rights, so it’s stuck in a legal limbo.

I’m aware it’s delisted, I had to track down a 2nd hand copy from America to play the game on PC. But the fact it’s showed up multiple times in different contexts in the Xbox BC program marketing materials in recent history leads me to believe that there is movement behind the scenes. It’s possible it’s just multiple unrelated accidents as to why they keep accidentally listing it in stuff, but that’s why I think they might have sorted it out and are just waiting for some kind of future event to relist the game.

It’s not clear why Wolf 09 would specifically be an intractable rights problem when the other Activision published game that utilized an id Software IP weren’t - Quake 4 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are still sold by Bethesda to this day.

Pete “Prince of Lies” Hines claimed that it was not so much a rights issue as a technical one as to why it was delisted from Steam:

https://i.imgur.com/g6JIzBF.png

I flat out don’t believe him, because the game was sold on Steam until May 2014. 2 weeks before the release of The New Order. The IP was transferred to Bethesda in 2009. Why did “technical issues” only crop up that week, but not the preceding ~4.75 years?

It could be a rights issue… they claim it’s not. But that still seems odd that they sold it for ~4.75 years, rather than 4 years or 5 years or some other more regular amount of time.

The timing being so close to the release of Wolf TNO seems highly suspcious to me, like it was a voluntary decision to pull the game, perhaps for internal political reasons (like they didn’t like Wolf 09, or didn’t want to “confuse people” by having the very different older game still for sale).

Technical, in that they don’t technically have the rights for it? :stuck_out_tongue: