Ten years after its release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has been updated on Steam. Ordinarily this would be good news, suggesting that changes had been made to make accommodations for new operating systems or hardware, but this new version of San Andreas takes far more away from the game than it adds. While it now boasts native support for the 360 controller, 17 songs have been removed from Rockstar's open world crime-'em-up, along with a few of the bigger resolution options (1080p included). Saves from the old version will no longer work, so if you have San Andreas installed and you haven't accepted the update yet, don't.
Why would a game be updated so long after release, and in a way that seems to intentionally make it worse? It's likely something to do with the recently released 'HD' version for the Xbox 360, which turned out to be a port of the mobile game. Xbox 360 owners were shafted there too, with the original Xbox version of San Andreas removed from Xbox Live to make room for the not exactly improved new one. Seemingly due to expired song licenses, Rockstar had to remove 17 tracks from the mobile version—and they've now updated the Steam game to bring it in line.
Rockstar Nexus noted the update, which doesn't appear to be bring any positives other than native support for Xinput controllers. The missing songs are detailed in this NeoGAF post.
This isn't the first time Rockstar has removed songs from the Steam version of one of their games. A couple of years ago, they did the same thing with GTA: Vice City, temporarily taking the game off Steam in order to take out several tracks. Licensing issues were the cause there too, but Rockstar went about it in a slightly different way. People who bought the game before its temporary removal were allowed to keep the offending songs, and that doesn't appear to be the case here.
As this is a PC game we're talking about, an unofficial patch has already been released that appears to fix some of the nonsense introduced by the official one. The missing songs, meanwhile, can be added back in with San Andreas' custom music station.
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