Night School Studio sent out an email to owners of Oxenfree on itch.io, to notify that it's going to be completely removed from the store on October 1st.
It's already been delisted and so the store page only shows up if you own it, which is what usually happens when developers / publishers properly move on, something we've seen a few times on Steam with various licensing issues. Usually though, it stays up for existing owners to download it.
Here, Night School Studio are completely removing it, so you won't be able to even download it from October 1st.
A few people sent this in but I've also been shared the email that was sent too (thanks, retrogunner):
No reason has actually been given as to why. Most likely, this is coming from Netflix, who actually acquired Night School Studio back in 2021. Probably as they're trying to pull in more people to play games under their umbrella directly on Netflix.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I only know of one instance of this, when Driver: San Francisco was delisted entirely.
It seems to works flawlessly on Linux ;)
As a customer I don't know who is responsible for this breach of trust. The only thing I know is: I won't buy ANY games anymore from Itch.io. I'm serious. Itch.io is dead for me from this moment onwards.
This makes no sense at all. It's the publisher's decicion, Itch is not be blamed here.
If Itch prevented the publisher from removing the game, the publisher could simply upload a new version of the game binaries that simply does not work and the result would be the same in the end.
Don't blame itch.io, blame the shitty publisher and the shitty music industry and their shitty copyright system.
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