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We hear about games being delisted all the time on the Xbox Store, and the same goes for Steam, the PlayStation Store, the Nintendo eShop and other platforms. It's just a reality these days that games do get delisted now and again.
When this happens though, you can normally still download them if you bought those titles previously. That's not the case for a very small number of games that have been "hard delisted", however.
The folks over at True Achievements have picked up on three games this week that have all been hard delisted in the form of Creepy Tale, Creepy Tale 2 and Strike Force Kitty. The reasoning behind it is apparently due to a developer and publisher dispute, with the developer claiming that No Gravity Games has violated their agreement and not paid any royalties to them for years.
They say they hope the games will return to the Xbox Store, but it's a difficult situation. The games are also set to be removed from the PlayStation Store imminently, and they've disappeared from the Nintendo eShop this week too (but we've yet to hear whether they're still downloadable for existing owners on Switch or not).
"It's a very slow and complicated process. I hope the games will return to stores with a new publisher."
Honestly, we're not sure why this means the games have to be hard delisted on Xbox, but speculation suggests that it's a case of Xbox complying with legal demands due to the ongoing dispute. Another title from the publisher is also said to have been delisted recently in the form of Bullets & Brains.
The good news is that, in some circumstances, you can still install games that have been hard-delisted. Assuming you've played them, it sometimes works to go to their Xbox achievements page and navigate to the Game Hub where an install button will be waiting for you. That doesn't seem to be the case for these latest three, however.
We've never had a major AAA title get hard-delisted in the modern Xbox era as far as we're aware, so don't panic too much here - it's not like your whole digital library is at risk. This particular issue seems to be isolated to the aforementioned dispute, but again, there's no official answer to why the games have to be hard-delisted in the process. We'll let you know if we hear anything from Microsoft on the situation.