Claims that Mixtape will be delisted over music licenses are ‘a lie,’ says publisher

Ever since a study theorized that around 87 percent of videogames are not playable without finding a physical copy or nabbing a digital one via piracy or an archive, I stopped feigning shock when a game gets delisted. Games with licensed characters or music have an especially rough time staying on digital storefronts: Star Trek: Resurgence and 29 Disney games have been vaporized since the year began.

If you’ve been worried that Mixtape, the narrative adventure game which launched earlier this month and has become the target of every possible opinion, will suffer a similar fate due to all the licensed songs in its soundtrack—they thought of that. In an interview with Kotaku, the game’s creative director Johnny Galvatron said developer Beethoven and Dinosaur paid extra “to keep Mixtape’s licenses up in perpetuity.”

Publisher Annapurna reiterated the point on X, saying in a post: “We heard some people say Mixtape would be delisted due to music licenses expiring. That was a lie. Have a great weekend, everyone.”

Granted, games get delisted for all sorts of reasons—this doesn’t protect the game from all of those reasons forever—but at the very least, it shouldn’t be down to Stan Bush’s legal team refusing to renew rights for The Touch. It’s an impressive feat considering that Mixtape has over two dozen licensed songs, some of which are big hits like Iggy Pop’s “Candy” and DEVO’s “That’s Good.”

Regardless of what you think of the game (PC Gamer staff writer Harvey Randall scored it a respectable 74% in his review, calling it “lovely, beautiful, [and] heartwarming,” but also noting it was “unable to convince me it needed my input as a player at all”), confidence in long-term preservation seems like a win for everyone.