The first week of 2019 brought a handful of dour news for gamers, not least of these was the recent – and possibly permanent – removal of the Lego Lord of the Rings and Lego Hobbit games from Steam by Warner Bros.
Early symptoms of this removal dated back to as early as 2015, where Warner Bros. announced that the Lego Hobbit wouldn’t receive the Battle of the Five Armies series DLC to round out their video game adaptation of the Hobbit movie trilogy.
While the game covered events that happened in the first two movies, this DLC was intended to finish off the series, as was the case with the other Lego video game adaptations of other movie series such as Harry Potter, and comic series such as Batman and Marvel’s Avengers.
Bizarrely, the store pages for the two games can still be found on Steam, but without any purchase links. This means that the game is still playable for anyone who had previously purchased it. Just last month, Lego Lord of the Rings and Lego Hobbit were both made free on the Humble store, but that link was already taken down at the time of writing.
What does this spell for the two games, and possibly for the Lego video game series as a whole? Will we get to purchase them again in future, despite their generally unfavourable ratings? Only time will tell.
On the bright side their more popular titles Batman, Harry Potter, and Marvel are still selling well and receiving relatively good news, so here’s hoping they’ve got more stellar Lego video games coming out.
Marion has a serious RPG addiction. Sometimes it bleeds into real life; he forgets to sleep because he thinks he has a Witcher’s body clock. Forgive him in advance if he suddenly blurts out terms such as “Mind Flayer” and “Magic Missile”, because never once does he stop thinking about his next Dungeons & Dragons game.