Postal 3has been delisted from the only platform it’s been available on, Steam. The 2011 release of the generally controversialPostalgame 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.
ThoughSteamcertainly plays host to a number of critically panned titles,Postal 3was a strange release that didn’t seem to appeal to the vast majority of regularPostalfans either, on top of the franchise’s more broadly unpalatable handling of subject matter. Notably,Postal 3was published by Akella and developed by the Russian company’s in-house studio, Trashmasters. The creator of thePostalfranchise, Running With Scissors, was not happy with the game and eventually had a falling out with Akella.
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Running With Scissors announced that DRM-related issues have resulted inPostal 3being 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 overPostal 3’s Steam page or the game’s source code, nothing could be done. Regardless, the original creators ofPostalseem content with the situation at hand, and in fairness, franchise fans are likely to have a better time playing theadmittedly ridiculousPostal 4: No Regertsinstead.
WhilePostalgames have always made their way onto lists of themost 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,Postalgames 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 manyPostalfans certainly don’t seem to have enjoyedPostal3 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 aDenuvo outage made major games totally unplayablefor 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 whetherPostal 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.
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