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Huh! I had no clue that it had been until you said something, Forest of Sorrow. On the store page it says,
Notice: At the request of the publisher, Vlad the Impaler is no longer available for sale on Steam.
https : / / store . steampowered . com / app / 295850 / Vlad_the_Impaler /
I am glad I already bought it and it's safely in my library!
Steam lists Section Studios (SS) as the Developer and Publisher. I wonder if maybe this property isn't being sold off to someone else. This would be a typical move when something like that happens, especially if that third party doesn't already have a contract with Valve yet. This leaves SS with no active titles now listed on Steam as a publisher; and only one remaining active title listing as a developer, which is Tinertia ...well, as a co-developer (or secondary one) with Candescent Games (CG). Tinertia also lists it's publisher with Steam as "Candescent & Studio" (CS?) -- I'm not sure what that means. https://store.steampowered.com/app/311930/Tinertia/ On a side note: Candescent has another game currently in Early Access on Steam called Lacuna Passage.
Section Studios was also involved with developing a game called Dead Realm (2015/2017), but it has also stopped selling on Steam with the same message, "At the request of the publisher."
https : / / store . steampowered . com / app / 352460 / Dead_Realm /
In this case, SS was the dev, and the publisher is listed as 3BLACKDOT. And while Dead Realm is no longer listed as actively available on Steam for 3BLACKDOT, they do still have a VR-only title called No Way Out - a Dead Realm Tale (2018), developed by Game Mechanic Studios. But back to SS, on the Dead Realm Announcements page on Steam, on Aug. 19 2019 it was announced that the Dead Realm servers would be shutting down on the27th of that month. At some point afterward the official domain for the game, deadrealmgame.com, appears to have been abandoned.
Later in 2018 Section Studios had a mobile game called Rival: Crimson x Chaos. I don't play mobile games, and I'm not sure how successful it was, but they have FB and Twitter pages:
https://www.facebook.com/playrival/
https://twitter.com/playrival
...but by Aug. 29, 2019 it was announced that its servers too were being taken down. The Rival game had a pair of Web domains, rivalcrimsonxchaos.com and rivalcxc.com, both of which are now also defunct.
And finally, while Section Studios still has a FB page: https://www.facebook.com/SectionStudios/ , it looks to me like there hasn't been any activity there since mid- to latter 2018. And, most tellingly perhaps, it looks like their company Web domain SectionStudios.com is abandoned or does not have a paid hosting service backing it any longer.
http://sectionstudios.com/
https://sectionstudios.com/
I think all of these are pretty strong indications that Section Studios has most likely shuttered. If there is anyone or anything left in the aftermath to look after the company's I.P. they may be in the process of liquidating those assets. Or, it may be that there's no structure in place to distribute income, so they have discontinued sales and reception of revenue for potential legal reasons.
Those are just guesses on my part.
Btw- Apologies for the length of this response. I was pretty much discovering these things as I went along.
Cheers!
Hmmm. I second that. Thanks for that concise answer Jordi! I did not even consider that. I had bought the game some time ago because of the subject matter, but maybe I should have actually installed it and given it a play!
Well, I guess with regard to my previous diatribe... Nevermind! <;b
IFF that is indeed the reason, perhaps it would be a good idea for Valve to call the fact out on all such games built on Flash?
Did anyone have any experience with DEAD REALM? Was it also Flash platform?
What a sorry excuse for a delisting...
The blackscreen at the start is easily fixed by either deleting or simply renaming the file in question.
"It looked like a .flv file hung up at the start, ending up with a black screen and music in the background.
I deleted this file:
\\Steam\SteamApps\common\Vlad\video\logo-sectiongames.flv"
Your PC does not spontanously combust, if some software company says that their software is no longer supported (although they would surely wish for it, to have forced sales).
What will all these mom and pop PCs do with their hidden object games, match three games and time management games whose engines mostly all are based on flash, especially the not so recent ones? Didn't hear anything something that there is a mass PC outage some people like to have.
EDIT: Finally finished a single, full playthrough after a handful of failed attempts. Gameplay-wise, I have nothing to object as even the Flash vids loaded fine.
25 screenshots in 4K resolution are in fact larger in size than the game itself. It didn't deserve to get delisted all of a sudden, without even the slightest hint, if not final discount for those unfortunate enough to not have purchased and played already.
Vlad Țepeș deserved better. For shame, gentlemen!