Game Will Also Be Taken Down From Switch, Xbox Stores
Asmodee Digital’s Pandemic, based on a popular board game, has been quietly delisted from Steam. It has been since, surprisingly, since January 6, 2022. It can no longer be bought on mobile either, surprisingly, and according to an Asmodee support email given to PC Gamer, the game Pandemic will be taken out of the Xbox Store on January 31st, 2022, and in the Nintendo Switch Store at the end of July 2022.
Pandemic, has, in fact, been taken off the Asmodee Digital website in fact. According to the use of the wayback machine, which pulls up timestamps of what a site had at a certain point of, well, time, this listing was done as early as November 2021, which no one seemed to notice, until now.
The strangest part is the reasoning given or lack thereof. The same email from the Asmodee support response said: “We have worked hard over 4 years on Pandemic and withdrawing it from the stores has not been an easy choice. This decision was made with a heavy heart for a multitude of reasons that we cannot disclose.”
The fact that they can not, and likely will not disclose the reasons thereof is a particular one. Pandemic is not the only game that Asmodee has made- they’ve made the digital board game version of Game of Thrones, for example. But if it was for, well, the issue that we may be all sensitive about and are sick of hearing, it doesn’t make sense.
While it’s true that the giveaway for the game in the Epic game’s store in 2020 was canceled due to this, we’re going into another year of the global issue. If they wanted to delist the game for that reason, they could have done the game delisting at about that same time, with the apologies that would have come with it.
However, since it is this late, it may have to do with something else we’re unaware of at this time. What it could be, we may never know. But if there are other games that revolve around, well, certain issues like this, that are delisted in the near future, we may get an indication as to why.