It’s been a whole ten years since the release of GTA 4, so it shouldn’t come to a surprise to fans of Rockstar that Grand Theft Auto 4 will have songs later removed this month due to an expired music license. This news may leave some fans feeling a little bit nauseous, particularly those who remember that Rockstar hasn’t been all that great at telling players when songs in their games are about to disappear forever.
One example is 2014, where the developers released a patch for GTA: San Andreas that came to the complete surprise of players. It removed a whole seventeen songs from the game’s soundtrack – though players had to learn about this by themselves. This isn’t the first time that Rockstar has done this, back in 2012 GTA: Vice City was suddenly removed from Stream and then released two days later with ten of its songs missing. Thankfully the information regarding GTA 4 was found out during a Kotaku UK report, so there won’t be any more unpleasant surprises for players this time. Songs will be leaving, for good, on April 26th.
Unfortunately, there has been no news on what these specific songs will be, though the report has indicated that it will be “a lot”. This would indicate that Rockstar likely has not renegotiated the rights to the songs involved in the game, thus it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume that a patch will be on the way to remove them from GTA 4 completely. There is another piece of information involved in the report to consider: PS3 players will have the opportunity to download digital versions of the songs getting removed. It hasn’t been confirmed whether PC and Xbox players will be allowed the same courtesy, though we expect that if not then the potential uproar may be enough for Rockstar to reconsider.
