Unless you're a huge Postal fan, you might be pretty ambivalent about whether you want to see Postal 3 delisted from Steam, given its bad reputation. Still, that's exactly what's happened; Trashmasters' game has been removed from Valve's platform owing to DRM issues.
Over on Twitter, Running With Scissors announced Postal 3's Steam demise, pointing to "DRM issues and overall shittiness" as the reasons behind the delisting. The studio says that it "didn't have control" over the Postal 3 Steam page, so there was nothing it could do about the DRM problems. Still, the studio says the game is "trash", so it's glad people won't buy Postal 3 anymore.
It's no surprise that Running With Scissors isn't the biggest fan of Postal 3. While RWS contributed character design and general direction to the game, programming and development were handled by Trashmasters, a studio made up of employees from Russian publisher Akella. RWS was so unhappy with the finished product that when it revisited Postal 2 twelve years after the release of the original game to create a DLC, it took the time and effort specifically write Postal 3 out of the series canon.
As well as announcing Postal 3's removal from Steam, Running With Scissors also tweeted that a special Discord event is being held to commemorate the game. Characteristically, it's called the "Rest In Piss P3 Celebration", and you can find it on the official Running With Scissors Discord server, if you want to commemorate Postal 3's demise for some reason. The event expires tomorrow at 1pm Eastern.
Running With Scissors also alludes to "other methods" you can use to get Postal 3, apparently acknowledging that users will pirate the game. However, that doesn't seem to bother the developer; RWS says "at least people won't be tricked" into buying the game on Steam.
So, what exactly are the DRM issues that led to Postal 3 being removed from Steam? Running With Scissors doesn't elaborate, but a quick look at the game's Steam reviews shows that it might be an issue with activating keys. According to one reviewer, the website on which Postal 3 keys can be activated was shut down, so even if you buy the game, you can't play it.
DRM is a controversial issue in the gaming community. Even when it's not stopping players from playing games, like in this instance, some devs say it's causing "unacceptable" playability problems or causing PC performance issues. Of course, that's when server outages aren't just making games unplayable. DRM can sometimes be an issue for game preservation, and that's obviously the case with Postal 3 as well.
With that said, Postal 3 isn't exactly a beloved classic, and it wasn't even before DRM stopped users playing it. The game has a very unflattering 24% rating on Metacritic, with one mixed critical review and 19 (yes, 19) negative ones. It's important to preserve the less beloved games as well as the masterpieces, of course, but it's hard to imagine too many people being sad about Postal 3's passing, and that apparently includes the IP holders themselves.
