Disney downloads Hercules, Finding Nemo, Cars and more on Steam

Although Disney is still in the video game business, we don't get as many movie tie-in titles and games based on its core IP as we used to. Now, Disney has made it even more difficult for us to return to the era of getting these games into mainstream service, as they just pulled 14 of them from Steam without any warning.

Not only did Disney pull 14 of its games from Steam without telling anyone it planned to do so, but it didn't even bother with a mass removal afterwards. The gaming world has had to rely on those who keep a close eye on these things, like Wario64, who spotted games being downloaded to the Steam backend and shared the unfortunate news with the rest of us.

Hercules, Finding Nemo, and more are no longer available on Steam

hercules riding pegasus in the hercules video game.

Games no longer available on Steam include Hercules, Cars, Toy Story Mania and Finding Nemo. Yes, as if finding the world's most famous clown wasn't hard enough, it's just gotten significantly more difficult to get your hands on him in video game form. The full list of Disney games that were unceremoniously ripped from Steam can be found below.

Phineas and Ferb: New Inventions
Disney's Hercules
Stunt island
Afterlife
Disney cars
Cars: Radiator Springs Adventure
Disney Toy Story Bundle
Toy Story Mania
Disney Winnie the Pooh
Disney Flight and Racing
Disney planes
Armed and dangerous
Chicken Little: Ace in Action
Finding Nemo

A KOTOR remake is nowhere to be seen, but Disney reportedly wants a KOTOR 2 remake

What if we only did one remake at a time?

Why did Disney delist all these games without telling anyone?

Why Disney decided to remove the aforementioned games from Steam without warning remains unclear. It's possible that the game has licensing issues with the studios that Disney used to develop these games, although that seems unlikely. Especially when the games were developed by different studios and released at different times. It is almost impossible for them all to suffer the same licensing fate at the same time.

The glass-half-full theory, as is the case when such a thing happens, is that Disney plans to re-release the games, perhaps in a bundle of some sort. More likely than a licensing explanation, but again unlikely given how different these games are. Spun from very different films and released during different generations.

This situation is reminiscent of when Sega recently decided to remove a lot of their own classics not only from Steam, but from all platforms. In Sega's case, we know that it's been working behind the scenes on remastered versions of older games like Crazy Taxi and Golden Ax, though more than a year after it made 60 of its older games unavailable, we're still waiting for almost all of those games.

There's been no such promise from Disney, which means there's a very real chance these games will be gone forever. If you can find them in any other online store, I would buy them now before it's too late. If you have physical copies or come across one at a reasonable price, pick them up and hold on tight. They are probably about to get much more valuable.