![Spec Ops: The Line Has Been Mysteriously Pulled From Steam [Updated]](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ss_9dd03fcdbe105958cfc31913b4941b1354396cf4.1920x1080-e1706574734890.jpg?quality=75&w=640&h=360&crop=1)
Spec Ops: The Line, a game widely regarded as one of the best military shooters ever made, has been pulled from Steam without any explanation.
Update 31 Jan 8:44 AM: We now have an explanation. As confirmed by Stephen Totilo at Game File, 2K apparently doesn’t want to keep paying licensing fees for certain content, so the game will be pulled from sale across all storefronts, not just Steam, in the coming weeks. Buy it now if you haven’t already. Original story continues below.
It’s not clear when the game was removed from sale on the platform, but its timing is certainly curious. Released in 2012, Spec Ops: The Line quickly became a favourite among critics and players. It was a linear, third-person military shooter that took Joseph Conrad’s oft-adapted war novella Heart of Darkness and repurposed it for the War on Terror, which was entering its second decade. It was a game that interrogated military agency and the morality of war. It asked the player to sit with the psychology of war crimes, and what it means to carry out those orders.
It added the one thing that Heart of Darkness and retellings of that story, like Apocalypse Now, were missing: a layer of interactivity. The knotty questions that the game poses to the player hit different specifically because you are the one in control.
The choice to delist a game explicitly about war crimes, what they are, what they mean, and how they are categorised is an interesting one. Doubly so when the UN has just ordered Israel to stop committing genocide, a war crime, in Gaza. I don’t know if these two things are connected. They might not be! I just think the timing is rather interesting.
Curiously, the Xbox 360 version still appears to be available on the Xbox store at the time of writing. Steam codes, batch purchased by those retailers prior to the game’s delisting, are still available for sale on the Humble Store and Green Man Gaming (though the price may be about to skyrocket).
Kotaku Australia has reached out to co-publisher 2K for comment. We’ll update this piece if we hear back.
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