Postal 3 has been delisted from the only platform it's been available on, Steam. The 2011 release of the generally controversial Postal game series has been widely criticized for a number of reasons, with its review score going as low as "Mostly Negative" on Valve's gaming storefront.

Though Steam certainly plays host to a number of critically panned titles, Postal 3 was a strange release that didn't seem to appeal to the vast majority of regular Postal fans either, on top of the franchise's more broadly unpalatable handling of subject matter. Notably, Postal 3 was published by Akella and developed by the Russian company's in-house studio, Trashmasters. The creator of the Postal franchise, Running With Scissors, was not happy with the game and eventually had a falling out with Akella.

Running With Scissors announced that DRM-related issues have resulted in Postal 3 being delisted from Steam, the only platform it was actually available on. From the studio's announcement, it seems like there were ways to side-step the ongoing DRM issues, but since Running With Scissors doesn't have control over Postal 3's Steam page or the game's source code, nothing could be done. Regardless, the original creators of Postal seem content with the situation at hand, and in fairness, franchise fans are likely to have a better time playing the admittedly ridiculous Postal 4: No Regerts instead.

With Postal 3's DRM issues and overall shittiness of the game itself, the game is officially no longer being sold on Steam.

We didn't have control over the page, so we couldn't make it free before the DRM issues began.

At least people will no longer buy that trash!#POSTAL3 pic.twitter.com/eXnZi7UVon

— Running With Scissors (@RWSstudios) November 21, 2022

While Postal games have always made their way onto lists of the most controversial video games of all time, one could argue that there's merit in playing them for the abject ridiculousness of the situations. Heavily satirical, Postal games have always been about the tasteless handling of important societal problems, but the third entry never ended up meshing with the franchise's fanbase.

Steam recently hit a new concurrent user record, counting over 30 million players enjoying PC video games at the same time. The sheer age of the platform and the breadth of content it hosts means that not every game available on Steam is a quality product, and many Postal fans certainly don't seem to have enjoyed Postal 3 or the way it was handled. Still, with no word on whether the game will be back up anytime soon, it's an obviously concerning situation.

Something similar happened in late 2021 when a Denuvo outage made major games totally unplayable for a while. The fact that a DRM server outage can outright disable legal copies of single-player games is a hard pill to swallow. The obvious question, then, is whether Postal 3's Act Control server will be back up and running anytime soon and whether this is a sign of things to come with a variety of other aging anti-tamper solutions.

Postal 3 is available exclusively on PC.

Posted: Nov 24, 2022 9:55 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/postal-3-steam-delisted/