A new surprise re-release of a fan-favorite open-world GTA-like game for PS2 has hit PC, but there are some questionable qualities to it. Back when Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto 3 and then Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, other publishers wanted a piece of the pie. Franchises like Saints Row and True Crime were born in the following years and a number of licensed crime movie games like The Godfather and Scarface: The World Is Yours tried to build off that formula. A lot of these games were actually pretty good and worthy entries into the open-world crime genre, but many of them have also been lost to time.
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These licensed games in particular haven’t been made backward compatible or re-released often because the rights issues are very complex. Not only are you dealing with a film franchise, but some of the studios that worked on them no longer exist and they even contained licensed music which complicates things. That’s why fans were shocked to see Scarface: The World Is Yours make a surprise return on PC this week.
Scarface: The World Is Yours Gets Strange Re-Release on PC
The game was published out of nowhere on Epic Games Store by a company known as EC Digital and was briefly available for just $29.99. The game’s Steam page also went live and noted there was a technical issue that pushed the game early on Epic, but it has since been pulled from sale.
There’s next to no information about EC Digital out there, but the one piece of info people have dug up about it is that the company was a games publisher from Hong Kong that dissolved in 2019. It seems like a random company to bring Scarface: The World Is Yours back to life. To make matters even more complicated, the Epic Games Store version was published with community-made mods and Silent, the developer behind the mod, claimed they didn’t sign off on this. Silent also doubted Universal, the rights holders to the Scarface IP, would approve this re-release.
Later, Silent went on to claim that the rights holders to Scarface are seemingly unaware of this and that the store listings were truly uploaded by accident. Some have expressed concerns that this is a big scam, especially given the use of placeholder assets in the storefront and the use of mods. It’s entirely possible this is all one big misunderstanding, but it’s a strange story nonetheless.
Either way, Scarface: The World Is Yours remains listed as “coming soon” on both PC storefronts, so we’ll just have to see what happens. It wouldn’t be surprising if these store pages are preparing for a release in the coming weeks, so we may not have to wait long to find out the full story.
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