Strap yourselves in for this one! Back in January, an indie game called One Step After Fall was released on Xbox, serving as a enjoyable little narrative experience with easy achievements that you could complete within 15 minutes.
Following this, the ID@Xbox game was updated with DLC that allowed players to earn another 1000 gamerscore, followed by a separate Windows version that also offered a separate 2000 gamerscore of its own.
Then, different versions of the game for certain languages began appearing on the Xbox Store, specifically German and Spanish. Both of these had their own achievements as well, meaning you could earn thousands of gamerscore if you bought them all. However, this soon drew the attention of ID@Xbox boss Chris Charla:
"Thanks for the heads up, we will take a look!"
The developer behind One Step After Fall has confirmed that the German and Spanish versions of One Step After Fall have now been delisted on the Xbox Store, and a planned release of the Spanish version for Windows has also been cancelled. It seems that even if you bought them, there's no way of re-downloading these versions.
Speaking on Twitter (translated via Google), here's a bit of what the developer had to say:
"Initially on behalf of The Bergson's Games Studios we would like to apologize for all the inconvenience caused to you, friends, players and consumers!"
"As of today, April 15th, the One Step After Fall Spanish and One Step After Fall German versions have been removed from the Xbox Store by Microsoft. Why? The information given to us was not clear."
"We are still trying to evaluate all possible options! But we don't have a clear answer at the moment. Again, we point out and apologize that you lost access to our games! No rules were broken on our part, but unfortunately the situation has become this."
The Bergson's Games Studios went on to explain that the team wanted to be transparent with fans, and thanked them for their support throughout the "controversies". It was also mentioned that they felt they had a "tarnished reputation" due to players having bought the German and Spanish versions and then losing access to them. This is ultimately the reason why the Windows (Español) version was cancelled:
"We have a tarnished reputation, people bought our games and now they have lost access. It would be selfish of us to release another version that will have the same fate."
If you want to read up on the developer's complete responses, you can check out The Bergson's Games Studios' full Twitter thread about the situation, and we thank True Achievements for bringing attention to the story as well.
It's obviously understandable that Microsoft wants to limit the number of achievements you can get per-game, but we also hope a solution can be found for those who bought the German and Spanish versions before they were removed.