The game was there before it was removed from GOG. I know, anecdotal evidence ain't much, but it is what it is. As for why it wasn't removed, the simple answer is because Codemasters may not even remember they have a catalog there and I wouldn't blame them, considering how little visibility the store has. Now, if someone would like to question Codemasters about this, they are more than welcome to do so.

My apologies, for some reason I didn't see your post. Well that's a really weird situation lol.

Well even if we put all of this copyright situations on the side, how does Zoom make any profit ?

I'm not trying to be insulting or anything but the website is hard to find and kinda looks suspicious. I know it's not the case but from a distance it looks like a fake company that makes no effort to try to grow because it makes money differently...

Now that I have thought more about, forgetfulness is not a valid defense should the car brands sue Codemasters, which leads me to put more weight on them either not receiving any money from the continued sales at all or for some odd reason they really think that their best course of action is to let the licenses expire while the game is only sold on a store that doesn't seem to show up on Google unless one remembers to include the word "platform" in the search.

But to be honest, gaming companies have done stupider things in the past, so I would not be surprised at all if the latter option would turn out to be true.

I'm pretty certain Zoom Platform's games are all DRM-free. They have no client, no mechanism for DRM to actually be implemented. I bought a handful of games from them today and they are all offline installers.

They seem to be a small store with low visibility, trying to get off the ground in a similar way that GOG was many years ago. Their income might be small, but the site as it is probably has very low overheads to keep running - I would think just domain name fees and server maintenance.

It seems the owners haven't really been prioritizing it recently, but hopefully that might change if they see a sudden influx of new business.

Well, this goes back to the situation before: Codemasters isn't obligated to contact Zoom. Zoom is obligated to keep their eye on it, and they appear to be too small to care. In a practical sense, though, this boils down to the license holders sueing Zoom, which isn't likely to happen. Now, if you wanted to throw some blame on Codemasters, keep the size of the site in check: they might not actually be getting revenue for new purchases if they aren't even happening.

It's not unlike GOG. The real moneymaker for CDP is CDPR, not GOG. GOG is an afterthought, another platform to sell their game on to undercut the 10% (or whatever) that Steam and ilk take. Zoom has admitted as much, so it makes sense that it's just kinda there. It's not trying to compete: they're more interested in making games than a store, but if people are willing to buy things from them, they'll be more than happy to be a storefront since they have the equipment for it. In this scenario, of course they don't want to get larger: that's more on their plate to deal with.

I had no idea the store part was just a "side project". I thought they were aiming to be a DRM-FREE alternative like GOG, which is why I was surprised that they haven't put in a lot of effort in recent years. My bad ! But as Time4Tea said, that could change, we'll see :)

Will see if they can release it on Zoom, but Zoom doesn't use paysafecards and they didn't want them so Zoom is not an option for me until they release anime drm-free for downloads somewhere then i will get a credit card.
Also i am not into horror games much. I will maybe one day get Sillent hill 4 here on GOG.
Devotion i still need to check out how that game even looks and plays.

If you think about it, and look at CDP's history, it appears tha tthe whole DRM-Free thing for gog was just a marketing ploy, so it makes sense they'd drop it, too. CDPR is their main schtick, so GOG, too, is really just a side project. Hell, I imagine even steam started otu that way, but i don't know on that one.

A little trick corporations try to do is get a certain authoritative reputation with a slogan. I remember a nursing home i worked at had the slogan "we care" and was also trying to pose as the most religious nursing home. Well, despite all the prayers in the wall, workers who bowed for prayer were usually mocked by peers, no surprise, there, but workers were encouraged to put on airs. If we were in areas that the customer couldn't see, well, totally different story. And the level of apathy there was terrible, and it certainly didn't run on any religious values given some of the shit going on behind closed doors. The idea is, you are to equate a company with the image it wants: steam is games. Epic is fortnite. Microsoft is "personal computer," implying it's not the case with linux and mac. iOS is "we have an app for that," even though i've found much more available on android for any practical tasks (games are a different story entirely, but that's a whole other topic). GOG is trying to be "DRM-Free," and i wants to corner that title. GOG, apparently, feels it is indeed the owner of that title, because it's been comming off that, but as you can see, it's already taken hold as 'the only DRM-free alternative." That's not true, as it would appear itch.io is far, far better. The problem with itch is finding what you want on there, and i don't think they actually have anything to enforce DRM-Free. I'm seeing other stores that appear to sell DRM-Free without even advertising it (Dempasoft and Fakku, i think might count as examples, too, but alot of japanese sites, including ones that aren't focused on pornographic content).

I would think this would depend on the specific agreement between the two parties, which none of us have access to. If the agreement allows ZP to sell the game 'until further notice', then I don't think that would put any obligation on Zoom to keep an eye on it.

When was the last time you've seen "until further notice" was in any license? Usually, licenses instead come with clauses like "we may change the terms at any time without notification" or something like that. I mean, sure, it's possible, but not very likely. Similarly, any judge would likely just demand purchases be removed. Technically, you could argue gog would be under that same order, too, since the licenses have expired. GOG just takes it out of the store, though, not our accounts. Our agreement with GOG doesn't continue to give us permission, but it does give us grounds to sue GOG if they keep to another license agreement themselves. In theory, it's on US not to play the games whose licenses have expired. Thing is, what is law, and what is actually followed and enforced, are often two very, very different things, which is why abandonware sites can feel confident using that term, which is painting a bullseye on them.

I am not familiar with typical contracts for video game distribution (are you?); however, I have never seen a contractual agreement that allows one side to unilaterally change the terms without any notice. That would be completely nonsensical. How would the other side be expected to know the terms have been changed? Usually, contracts can be cancelled by either side, but some sort of written notice is typically required.

I don't think this is true. I don't believe publishers on GOG can simply revoke licenses for games that have already been purchased. If so, please show me where that is in GOG's sales agreement.

Again, the point I am making is that none of us know the specific details of the agreements between Zoom Platform and their publishers. Therefore, a lot of the criticism in this thread is based on nothing but speculation and in my opinion needs to stop.

If you or anyone else is concerned that ZP is selling game without a proper license, I recommend contacting the publishers.

You mean publishing contracts, because we see contracts all the time for games. And the clause i quote comes from social media contracts (yes, they are contracts). When was the last time you read GOG's EULA (GOG's contract per purchase)? For me it's been a while, but i'm sure the phrasiology would be enlightening. Wouldn't have to be the publishers. If the publishers "loose the rights," it's not them who cancels. All our rights come downstream. Just follow how the law handles the selling of stolen property, which is basically how this would be framed in a court. Not the publishers. The license holders for the content of the expired licenses. They're the ones that can actually sue, and have a vested interest. So, say someone makes a BMW game, has a temporarly license, and the game gets sold on GOG. You don't contact GOG, you don't contact CarGameMaker, you contact BMW since they're the ones who have the grounds to complain.

I think what you're missing is that the expired licenses are between the publishers and some other party, not the storefronts and the publishers.

Unfortunately pretty certain is not good enough for me anymore after spending years buying physical copies only after having become pretty certain that I should be able to download a NoCD fix for each of them, nowadays the only way I will agree to pay a single cent for a new copy is when a game is officially sold DRM-free.

Lets see, any legal notification tends cost some fixed sum of money to process, so if I was a license holder I would first contact Codemasters with a friendly email and ask that they pull their game from any store they have a deal with and send me a list of those stores so that I can verify that they all have complied before I would unleash my legal department to seek out any rogue stores.

Seems whomever owns some of those licenses didn't bother with verification or didn't think zoom was worth it. Or Codemasters withheld that information. Either way, if you were a license holder, the game with your content wouldn't be on Zoom, right now, would it?

That's never an excuse for them to publicly behave like a thin-skinned asshat to both a competitor and its customers (who could potentially become your [that is, Zoom's] customers, if you don't alienate them). Admittedly, the situation might well have been "more complicated than [we] think", as they posted elsewhere in that thread, but all they accomplished in the exchanges with both the GOG rep and the random people who replied was shooting themselves in the foot and making GOG look like the good guys.
As mentioned in the Twitter exchange, it was Killing Time (I believe this was before Ziggurat acquired the rights to it; I don't remember who published it at the time); and they used the FCK DRM publicity stunt and GOG's harmless mention of them as a DRM-free retailer as an excuse to publicly vent their anger about either losing exclusivity for that game (it's still available there...though it's free now, LOL) or GOG getting access to their build (which, if it happened, would've been the publisher's call anyway), I'm not sure which. (Maybe both.) At any rate, GOG did quickly remove mention of them from FCKDRM.com, and any behind-the-scenes accommodation they might have made regarding the other issue obviously wouldn't be made public. But, again, neither of these issues should've been broached first in a public venue.

On a more minor (though more practical) note, their new site is infinite-scrolling, no-sorting-options garbage. Much more importantly, though...
The problem with this is that anything purchased there while there isn't such a guarantee displayed on the either the product page or somewhere else prominent (there's also nothing about it on either the "about" page -- which seems to have been written for investors and/or corporate partners, rather than store customers -- or the "services" page) doesn't have to be supported as such. That's one of the main reasons I won't get anything there for now (another being that they have little, if anything, that I'd want. :P ).

It's great that there's another "DRM-free"-friendly site (at least until proven otherwise), and it's cool that they have older games that GOG and/or Steam don't carry. It's also good that there's another option for those of you for whom regional pricing is a sticking point. But I will reserve judgement on the store (separate from my judgement of their rep's petulant behavior on Twitter ;P ) until a few more features -- and worthwhile [to me] games -- are in place.