Once a game is pulled from stores, it’s usually gone for good unless it receives an official rerelease, but we may witness some rare exceptions in the near future.
Capcom pulled a handful of their titles from Steam years ago including Street Fighter X Tekken, and there’s some evidence building that they could be returning to the service soon with some updates.
All the way back in 2021, the company de-listed its PC titles that still relied on Games for Windows Live after the service finally shut down its servers in 2020.
This left games like SFxT unable to launch properly or function from a normal download and required a fan made patch to actually play it — so it’s no real surprise that they wouldn’t want to continue selling games that didn’t technically work.
Considering that it’s been almost three years since that time, however, hope appeared to be fading though this trajectory could soon be changing.
Titles like Street Fighter X Tekken, Lost Planet 2 and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City have been receiving a slew of new updates on the backend of Steam within the past week and month, suggesting a return for them could be imminent.
These updates include apparently new branch builds as well as higher quality game logos, banners and artwork that Capcom probably wouldn’t go through the trouble of doing if they planned to just let the pages sit as is forever.
Before this, SFxT’s store page hadn’t really been touched in over five months according to SteamDB.
We already witnessed this work out once before with Capcom fully removing GFWL from Resident Evil 5 early last year, so it’s certainly something they can do.
This had fans hopeful, however, that the crossover fighter would be available again soon after except it’s been over a year and a half since RE5 got patched.
While everything is looking fairly positive right now, we’re not going to be the house on this all coming to fruition just yet considering there were similar times that updates came and amounted to nothing tangible for the public.
But the addition of new store assets and builds is the most promising update we’ve seen on that end.
Street Fighter X Tekken is not backwards compatible on Xbox, and with no console re-release, getting the game back on PC would be the only way to access this historic title on modern hardware.
With Tokyo Game Show 2024 kicking off in just a few hours, perhaps Capcom will have a nice little surprise for fans and finally bring these titles back (even though we wouldn’t be too upset if Operation Raccoon City stayed gone honestly).
The company has also shown some more dedication as of late to revive their fighting games that weren’t officially available anywhere thanks to the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection and upcoming Capcom Fighting Collection 2 featuring Capcom vs. SNK titles, so now seems like a good time to throw a bone to one of their other big crossover too.