I think it's usually because of licences expiring, e.g., music in the soundtrack or real life cars in a racing game. Or sometimes a publisher releases a cash grab 'remaster', and it wants people to only be able to buy that version, of course at a much higher price.
Who really knows? Maybe they delist, then wait a few years before releasing a remaster version for current retail price.
No, they ask for buyers to purchase the recent titles. ( They think )
I'm not sure, the only reason I can think of is that keeping the game available means having to offer technical support for it. And they don't want to maintain too many games at once, or I don't know if they'd have to maintain them, but they'd have to maintain the technical support knowledge for them, and that would be an especially difficult target, and a moving one, since there would always be issues as OSs, other affecting software, and hardware advance/appear.
yes, a lot of these media outlet decisions encourage piracy, but that's kind of a human thing - put a wall around something and some people are just going to try to make holes in the wall...sometimes they have to though, often for legal reasons, like licensing issues (especially music copyrights) or some agreement/contract they made 10 years ago or whatever has expired and they can't sell the game anymore, or my favorite case is the game No One Lives Forever and its sequel: nobody can agree on who has the rights to sell the game, been in and out of courts for years with no resolution in sight...typically stuff like that OR it could just be Disney Syndrome: just artificially, strategically taking shit out of print because reasons and shut up
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