Something something digital ownership
So its due to sync rights. Oof. I wonder if some of the song licenses (looking at you, Experience Hendrix) are the culprit.
The Line really is an example of a painfully average game held up by its narrative, and hot damn, how well it held up. I adore some of the moments of this game, especially for their vicissitude.
It gets really murky and there is a question of intent but… I think it is truly elevated by how painfully average it is. That is the game that everyone was making and playing, right down to the overhead camera explosives shot with the mortars.
And what made The Line “work” is that… it pointed out how fucked up it is that this is so normalized. We had been trained, arguably indoctrinated, by so many Call of Duty style games that there was zero question about how fucked up what we were doing was.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so. Rather than understanding that “walking away” is… maybe not buying the annual, rather mid, "shoot brown people in the middle east’ simulator.
The licenses referenced likely have to do with the game’s music. During the The Line’s menu screen, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” can be heard while the game’s soundtrack includes Martha and The Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run.”
The same thing happened to the first Alan Wake before they worked something out to get it back (even though it took almost a decade). Consequently, that’s also one of the reasons they wrote original songs for the sequel. It’s very much a gamble these days to license music for games. More or less puts it on a timeline to be removed at some point.
Perpetual sync rights licenses aren’t unheard of, but typically these require an ongoing revenue split of sales or a big up front. More often than not, limited rights are used to save scratch and because its going to be for a set period, like 30 days (for an ad campaign).
In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if Take Two opted for perpetual, and decided they won’t afford a per unit sale anymore, and pulled the game to stop paying.
If you have time for some reading, here’s a really great article from a few years ago that talks about licensing in video games and how complicated it can be (the first half of the article is really the only relevant part). Depending on what exactly you want to do with the music in/with the game, a developer could be looking at having to deal with more than one license. I imagine it could get expensive very easily.
