During the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, we got a bunch of high-quality games based on the iconic toy line Transformers courtesy of publisher Activision, which held the video game rights at the time.
Microsoft's proposed purchase of Activision has had some fans thinking we could potentially see some of these games come to Xbox Game Pass – a positive move when you consider that the licence has long since expired and none of the games are available for purchase digitally.
Unfortunately, it would seem that Activision hasn't done a great job of keeping track of the source files for said games.
In an interview with Transformers World, a Hasbro staffer said:
Sadly, apparently Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building. When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating. Hope is that now that the deal is moving forward with Microsoft and Xbox that they’ll go through all of the archives and every hard drive to find it all, because it’s an easy Game Pass add. We want those games back up for people to have a chance to play.
Potential titles 'lost' by Activision include Transformers: War for Cybertron, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Transformers: Rise of The Dark Spark and Transformers: Devastation, the latter of which was developed by PlatinumGames (Bayonetta, Vanquish). There are other Transformers games related to the live-action movies which are believed to be included in this, too.