Thanks Complicated Music Licensing Schemes: ‘Alan Wake’ Updated To Remove Bowie Song From Credits

Here we go again. For those of us that view video games as a vital and still emerging form of culture and art, one of the more frustrating aspects of the industry is how music is licensed for game soundtracks and how that licensing complicates games as they age. For instance, we saw this play out earlier this year with an aged Spec Ops: The Line game getting delisted from Steam entirely, much to the surprise of both the public and the director of the game. The culprit? Well, the licensing for the soundtrack in the game had expired.

Now, think about what this means if you place this in the context of preservation of culture. Soundtracks are obviously important in entertainment mediums. Music can make or break a film or TV show. Video games are no different. I fell in love with the Mass Effect series long ago, for example, and a huge part of it was the atmospheric draw of the soundtrack.

But as important as the music is, as I can feel the copyright protectionists out there nodding along with me, so too is the cultural output that makes use of it to create a whole new piece of art. Take the hit game Alan Wake from 2010 as an example. Alongside an excellent original score, the soundtrack also features several licensed songs, most notably David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Or, it did, that is, since the original release will have that song stripped out of it in an update due to a licensing expiration.

‘Catastrophe of epic proportions’: eight drown in Europe amid heavy floods

Eight people have drowned in Austria, Poland and Romania and four others are missing in the Czech Republic as Storm Boris continues to lash central and eastern Europe, bringing torrential rain and floods that have forced the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes.

Swathes of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia have been battered by high winds and unusually fierce rains since Thursday.

Austria’s vice-chancellor, Werner Kogler, said on Sunday that a firefighter had died tackling flooding in Lower Austria, as authorities declared the province, which surrounds the capital, Vienna, a disaster area.

Some areas of the Tirol were blanketed by up to a metre (3ft) of snow – an exceptional situation for mid-September, which saw temperatures of up to 30C (86F) last week.

Rail services were suspended in the country’s east early on Sunday and several metro lines were shut down in Vienna, where the Wien River was threatening to overflow its banks, according to the APA news agency.

Emergency services made nearly 5,000 interventions overnight in Lower Austria where flooding had trapped many residents in their homes. Firefighters have intervened about 150 times in Vienna since Friday to clear roads blocked by storm debris and pump water from cellars, local media reported.