Our colleagues at Kotaku UK broke the news yesterday that music licensing issues will force Rockstar Games to remove some songs from Grand Theft Auto IV, a game that celebrates its 10-year anniversary this month.
A Rockstar representative confirmed to us today that songs will indeed be removed but added that the company will add songs to the game as well.
“Due to music licensing restrictions, we are required to remove certain songs from the in-game soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto IV and its Episodes, in particular a large portion of the Russian pop station, Vladivostok FM,” the Rockstar rep explained in an e-mailed statement.
“However we are replacing some of those songs with a new set of songs on that station. We will update our customer support website with new information as soon as it is available.”
It’s unclear how soon this is happening, but GTA fans will likely appreciate finding this out in advance. As our colleagues at Kotaku UK noted, the removal of songs has happened to GTA games before without much, if any, forewarning to fans:
This exact situation has happened with Grand Theft Auto games before: the PC version of GTA: Vice City temporarily disappeared thanks to a dispute over a Michael Jackson licence, and GTA: San Andreas had a PC patch that removed songs.
In both cases this happened around ten years after those games’ release dates.
With San Andreas in particular, players were angry because the changes weren’t flagged in advance, and so folk were downloading a patch without realising it removed content from the game.
Our UK sister-site reported that GTA IV‘s music change will happen on April 26. Rockstar did not clarify the time-frame, though we’ve asked in a follow-up.
We’re unsure exactly which songs will be affected and if songs outside of the Russian station will be cut as well. According to the unofficial GTA wiki, the Vladivostok FM station originally included 13 songs, mostly Russian pop, with 15 more added in the episodic expansion The Ballad Of Gay Tony.
Comments
8 responses to “Rockstar Must Cut Some Music From GTA IV, But Plans To Replace It”
Is this game playable on PC again yet? Last time I tried I ran into a Games For Windows Live brick wall.
I belive GFWL was removed on the steam version.
Is it playable though? Not so much. Its still a really crappy console port and runs badly on even modern high end hardware. Ive got a card that can easily handly 4k gaming yet GTA4 barely manages to run and 40-50 FPS at 1080p.
How long ago did you try? I was playing it last year without any issues.
Would have been somewhere around when GTAV came out. Good to know I can give it another go now.
They killed off GfW and patched out the need for games to use it.
I guess I tried it in that window between GFWL dying and them patching it.
Replace them with funny but good parodies, that be cool.
Would have thought by now Rockstar would just make an in-game integration with Spotify and make curated playlists for music stations…