Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, EA’s executive vice president for marketing, commercial and positive play — Chris Bruzzo — has offered some clarification on what happened over the last few months with the de-listing (and subsequent re-listing) of the Syndicate and Ultima Underworld games in GOG’s catalogue:

…the delisting came from a breakdown in the publisher’s process for managing the digital titles it has on sale, and has since changed this procedure to avoid similar situations in future.

“When making decisions that affect players we take the time to review exactly what the potential impacts are and whether they serve the players best interests,” he explained. “When we delisted Syndicate and Ultima Underworld we missed that step and so didn’t fully consider the players perspective.

“From the level of interest players showed in delisting these games, it was clear that people still wanted them to be available, so we did two things.

“The first was to ensure that going forward we have a process in place that considers the player perspective in listing decisions. The second was to relist the titles and make them available to as many people as possible with a month-long promotion.”

He added: “We saw so much love for these titles, more than twenty years after they originally launched we realised that we had to make them available again.”

I’m not quite sure what a “process for managing the digital titles it has on sale” might entail, but I assume it probably has something to do with looking at which titles are for sale on which storefront(s), what cost(s) are associated with keeping them listed there, and how many sales they’re generating. And I could certainly see it being the case that actual sales of digital copies of Syndicate and Ultima Underworld at GOG might have dwindled to a fairly small number by now; most people who want copies in their libraries probably have them there.

So it makes sense, in a vacuum, that EA might have marked these titles for de-listing, if sales of them had diminished to barely a trickle. But of course, in this hypothetical vacuum, there’s no consideration given to not just whether the games are being sold, but also the emotional connection that the fans of these games have with them, the affection they have for them.

Still, it would seem EA have learned from this brouhaha; the games have been re-listed on GOG, and EA’s marketing group seems set to try and consider things not so easily tracked on spreadsheets when looking at which titles to keep listed on digital storefronts.

(Hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)