10 Video Games That Were Pulled From Digital Store Shelves (And Why)

7. LEGO The Lord Of The Rings

lego lord of the rings
Traveller's Tales

The LEGO games have been a staple of PC and consoles for more than a decade, with over 20 different entries having been released since 2005, each of them set in worlds like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Indiana Jones, and Marvel.

They clearly perform very well financially for publisher Warner Bros, so it was quite surprising when two of these games were removed from digital storefronts in 2019.

The games in question were LEGO The Lord Of The Rings and LEGO The Hobbit, which vanished from Xbox, Steam, and PlayStation stores in January of that year.

Addressing this disappearance, Warner Bros merely stated that the games were no longer available to purchase, but they failed to provide a reason why. Naturally, most people thought that licensing issues were to blame, but considering that Warner Bros actually had a hand in making the Middle Earth movies, you would assume that licensing wouldn't be an issue here. But perhaps not!

In the end though, all was well, because the games returned to digital storefronts earlier this year. And hey, most of the LEGO games are extremely similar from a gameplay perspective, so if you were looking to smash some bricks and collect some studs between January 2019 and mid-2020... you had plenty of other choices!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!