Back in December of last year, we highlighted a post from an Xbox fan known as UpstairsNo9249 who had advised that Microsoft had been quietly (and perhaps accidentally) removing access to a handful of games even if you owned them.
The issue was fixed in some cases, but now it's apparently reared its ugly head again, with the poster sharing 13 games (seven of which weren't mentioned in last year's post) that have been "hard-delisted".
We'll include the post below, along with a list of all the affected games and a couple of quotes:
"When a store page is hidden, you just get the error message "We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found". If the console cannot see the page because of this, it no longer recognizes the game exists. It doesn't show up in the store. And most importantly, it no longer shows up in owners libraries."
"Things had died down and I hadn't seen more games added to the list of hard-delisted titles, but it seems to have picked up again. 3 months ago, Miles & Kilo and Kid Tripp were removed from owners libraries. In October, Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign was taken away from owners. Yesterday, Hamster on Rails was removed, bringing the count to 13 titles."
- Oniria Crimes
- Polychromatic
- Project Downfall
- One Step After Fall German
- One Step After Fall Spanish
- Black & White Bushido
- Fermi's Path
- Quantum Rush Champions
- Miles & Kilo
- Kid Tripp
- Fat City
- Hamster on Rails
- Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign
When this was happening last year, there was some confusion over whether the issue was primarily on Microsoft's end or that of the game's publisher, and nobody seems to have a definitive answer on it.
In any case, even though these are small indie games, it'd be great to see some kind of resolution for them in the near future - at least making them delisted rather than hard-delisted so that owners could see them in their libraries again.
For what it's worth, if you own any of these games and you want to find them, there are a couple of workarounds you can try. The OP on Reddit shares one of them, and we'll drop another one from a TrueAchievements commenter below:
DonkeyBong71 on TA: "If you've played it go guide button > Game Activity > All Achievements, takes you to the Gaming tab of your profile, should be on that list somewhere. Then click on it, tab over to Welcome and click on Launch Game. That'll take you to the game hub where you can Install.
If you haven't played it, won't be there. But no worries, you just need to find someone who has played it, search their profile and get to the game hub through there. I actually beandived this on 27 July, and it appears I was maybe the last person to unlock an achievement, lol! Your welcome to look thru my list, but I'm still on that beandive and it's waaayyy way down the list now. It maybe worth checking out the other more recent unlocks, there's not many. But you will find it on mine, just a long way down. And furthermore, you can use this backdoor trick on anything that's been hard delisted."
We'll keep tabs on the situation and see if Microsoft decides to say anything publicly - but keep in mind that this might be more of a publisher issue than anything specifically on Xbox's end. Maybe it's a bit of both!