"Postal 3" (opens in new tab) has been abruptly discontinued on Steam, citing problems with the DRM system and the fact that it has been a miserable experience to play since its release 11 years ago.Running With Scissors, announced in a tweet (opens in new tab) that the game has been discontinued, citing "DRM issues and the overall suckiness of the game itself."

Running With Scissors did not elaborate on what the DRM issues are, but a recent review on Steam suggests that the server the game was calling home has simply broken down and is unlikely to return anytime soon. Or ever will; you can still get the DRM-free version elsewhere (opens in new tab), but, well, you might as well not.

Some might argue that every "Postal" game was a tedious exercise that said nothing for crying out loud, but it's hard to deny that "Postal 3" marked the bottom of the series. The game's development was outsourced to a third-party studio called Akella, but Akella went bankrupt shortly after "Postal 3" was released (open in new tab), and no one was happy with the final product. Since then, the game has mostly served as a marketing tool for Running With Scissors: Since then, the game has mostly served as a marketing tool for Running With Scissors.

In our "Postal 3" review (opens in new tab) (which gave the game a 21% complaint), "Postal 3" was heavily criticized for "replacing the previous open world with a matted mass of short passages filled with useless and nearly comatose AI enemies." On the plus side, the game had the good sense to crash a lot, giving me multiple opportunities to never boot it up again.

The worst, however, was the script, which missed the mark so catastrophically that the Uwe Boll film (open in new tab) that Postal mandated to be produced in the mid-2000s looked slick by comparison. Osama bin Laden, Sarah Palin, AIDS jokes: every 4chan joke of the 2011s was there, and they were all as funny as could be expected.

I'm usually a big fan of archiving games, for better or worse, but it's hard to be too heartbroken that "Postal 3" is no longer available on Steam. If you really want to play this game, whether for reasons of self-loathing or academic interest, the studio has one suggestion: buy a pirated copy (opens in new tab).

Update: This article has been revised to clarify that only the Steam version of Postal 3 is no longer available; the DRM-free version is still available elsewhere.