Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim unclear.
The media conglomerate’s planned removal of those games echoes cuts from its film and television business; Warner Bros. Discovery infamously scrapped plans to release nearly complete movies Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, and removed multiple series from its streaming services. If Warner Bros. does go through with plans to delist Adult Swim’s games from Steam and digital console stores, 18 or more games could be affected.
News of the Warner Bros. plan to potentially pull Adult Swim’s games from Steam and the PlayStation Store was first reported by developer Owen Reedy, who released puzzle-adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions through the label in 2016. Reedy said on X Tuesday the game was being “retired” by Adult Swim Games’ owner. He responded to the company’s decision by making the Windows PC version of Small Radios Big Televisions available to download for free from his studio’s website.
I’m waiting for the day when actors and game devs refuse to work on things owned by WB because the risk of wasting their time and efforts is too damn high.
I mean it already happens in my industry. I absolutely choose who I work for, or based on their reputation, ensure I get compensated and control.
The indie game industry is pretty inexperienced overall, and publishers do take advantage of that.
Yet another reason piracy is right and just
I think even Gaben will approve
Okay I (don’t, actually but whatevs) understand how you can do some tax-swindle capitalist-bs with unrealised stuff but how are they making money from “retiring” games (and is it the same scam as with the animated shows that you can only watch now if you sail the high seas?)?
So this is just a thing now? Removing media from the world?
They found out it works so now it’s gonna become a trend.
They’ve been trying for at least 30 years, probably closer to 50-60 TBH.
One of the concepts they(RIAA/MPAA) were looking into for the entire CD/DVD era was the idea of a time-limited disk that would only work for a short period of time before becoming unreadable.
By the time they got it working, Steam was already a thing and distribution through physical media was on the way out.
Now they control movie theaters through streaming. They stream the movies to the theaters, the theaters rarely get physical or even digital copies anymore. It just gets streamed right to the projector.
They also monitor outbound streaming. I’ve twice had a documentary movie I was watching at a theatre stopped because so one was supposedly live streaming the movie to the internet. The second time it happened they stopped the movie until the person doing it stopped, only it turned out they made a mistake and no one was live streaming it at all - they just interrupted the movie for fucking ages because of wanky attitudes. What made it even more stupid was that it was a special screening for a one off event AND a pretty niche documentary that most people wouldn’t give a fuck about let alone pirate 🙄
That was always the point of digitizing the world. It’s crazy to me that people didn’t see it coming, but it’s nice that people are actually taking notice now.
I was talking about how this would happen for about a decade, since the decline of popularity of physical media. Nobody listens.
But digitizing does have some benefits, like bit-for-bit archival, usually by a “third party”
Sure there are good uses for it, but not the way we’ve been aggressively shoving it into every space we possibly can, consequences be damned.
It was the point of software as a service and DRM
I think SaaS with fallback licenses is a good deal for everyone. But those are rare so I agree
I disagree, digitizing is what is saving a lot of the media. You can save hundreds of thousands of hours of videos and many games in a single 20TB drive today. You couldn’t do that without digital technology.
In fact, the lack of digital storage is why, to name an infamous example, the only recordings of most episodes of the original Doctor Who show are from the private collections of viewers: the BBC, lacking both funding and storage space, were forced to record new content over episodes with no backup.
I hate it when luddites pine for the days of my childhood and early adulthood where the storage, transfer, and use of every single type of media was so damn impractical compared to now.
It’s like wanting to go back to horses and walking being the only forms of land transportation because some trains are loud 🤦
It’s more like wanting to go back to horses and walking because some cars have started driving themselves to the manufacturer to be scrapped in the middle of the night, but i have to agree with you.
Yeah, it’s bizarre reading people say they want physical games because if it’s not physical steam might remove it. Bro just download it and don’t delete it from your device, steam is offering a re-download service but nothing is stopping users from just downloading the game and keeping it in their disks.
Steam also gives you the option to archive your games in a format compatible with dvds.
Weve lost far more pre-digital copies of games than we have digital.
Physical media breaks and degrades, once they stop selling it in a store and your copy doesnt work anymore its gone forever.
Like you’re just so utterly wrong it’s mind boggling to see your comment upvoted by so many.
You can make copies of physical media. Disk imaging isn’t some archaic sorcery lost to time, you know.
Well, you can make copies of digital media too.
Sure, there’s DRM, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s digital or physical in that instance, DRM can be added either way.
It is far easier to make an iso work than to crack a compiled program open and edit out its securities, and anybody who says otherwise has no idea what they’re talking about.
Why do you think a game on a physical disk won’t have securities?
Because it in its entirety can be run with a disk reader and associated hardware. At most it might ask for a license code, but otherwise any physical game or video that needs online connection via a proprietary app is just a digital good with extra steps.
pirate stuff you want to preserve
At least the developer for Small Radios Big Televisions is handing it out for free now. Looks like a pretty decent game.
The developer of another game distributed by WB, Fist Puncher, commented on the Ars Technica story about this.
Found it, it’s the “Promoted Comment” now.
therealmattkain I’m one of the creators and developers of Fist Puncher which was also published by Adult Swim on Steam. We received the same notice from Warner Bros. that Fist Puncher would be retired. When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators.
This is incredibly disappointing. It makes me sad to think that purchased games will presumably be removed from users’ libraries. Our community and our players have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which will all be lost. We have Kickstarter backers who helped fund Fist Puncher (even some who have cameo appearances in the game) who will eventually no longer be able to play it. We could just rerelease Fist Puncher from our account, but we would likely receive significant backlash for relaunching a game and forcing users to “double dip” and purchase the game again (unless we just made it free).
Again, this is really just disappointing. It seems like more and more the videogame industry is filled with people that don’t like and don’t care about videogames. All that to say, buy physical games, make back-ups, help preserve our awesome industry and art form. March 7, 2024 at 12:51 am
IIRC Steam lets people who purchased (or rather add to their library) a game access to it indefinitely. A famous example was second party side-scrolling half-life game named Codename Gordon. It’s delisted but still available with the right steam command. I personally also have a source mod on steam on my account where it had been delisted due to potential lawsuit but I can still play it if I wanted.
IIRC Steam lets people who purchased (or rather add to their library) a game access to it indefinitely.
That has definitely been the case with at least some games in the past that publishers removed. I am not aware of any cases where a game that someone purchased stops being available.
That being said, I kind of suspect that if it’s not possible to buy it any more, an existing player probably isn’t going to be getting much by way of any fixes at that point, but that’s gonna be the case for any game at some point.
Why would anybody work with Warner brothers now.
Relevant link for Small Radios Big Televisions.
Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation
That’s all, folks!
… why? They’re complete products that just sit there and make money for almost no effort
I think they’re trying to close adult swim games. If that happens, the money from sales go nowhere, so they’re delisting the games too.
The whole Warner Bros thing is such garbage.
Tax fraud, baby
From what we have seen from Zaslav, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re going to claim another creative tax write-off for the non-depreciated value of the assets.
Making money by destroying/burying digital media. What a backwards world we live in…
Even worse, only to appease shareholders that are only after short term gains and might even bet on the company failing.
WarnerBrosDiscovery is in massive debt (40 billion) to AT&T, which is itself in even more debt (138 billion). They are trying to make as much money liquid as quickly as they can to pay off the debt, long term profitability be damned. I wouldn’t be surprised if WBD is bought by an ever bigger player in a few years (Apple, Sony, Disney or Microsoft).
Does my nose deceive me, or am I catching a whiff of yet another monopoly?
Quintopoly right now, Quadopoly if WBD gets acquired. Probably a Triopoly or Duopoly fairly soon after that.
But we have antitrust laws and everything!
I think we’re in a slow burning culture war that is trying to erase everything but one single mindset of thought.
Discovery channel felt it early, and now that same sentiment is spreading everywhere. Cut away the vibrant ecosystem for a single channel, controllable narrative.
And it’s across every fuckdamn media.
Sometimes I feel I’m fortunate to have ADHD. Until I think about my life not on the Web.
As an aside: I’ve begun to think that ADHD and some other neurodivergences are actually evolutionary responses to the exponentially increasing amount of data processing that modern humanity does on a daily basis, just not having long enough time for natural selection to smooth out the rough edges yet. Give it a few hundred thousand years or so.
Like we are those prehistoric transition mudskipper-like fish things that traded part of their swim control for the ability to absorb oxygen through their swim bladders, they couldn’t swim as well as swimmy things, couldn’t walk as well as walky things today, but at that moment it was the only chordate to be able to hunt the shore.
We’re species transition in action maybe.
You speak one of the scariest truths there is.
This is honestly the only reasonable explanation. Adult Swim was millennial counterculture, and now there is an effort to undo it and erase it from mainstream history.
That seals it, digital piracy is the freedom to shape our culture in the face of greedy corporations. A moral good.
They already have. Can you install Super Monsters Ate My Condo? Released 10 years ago, great android game, gone now.
From wikipedia:
Monsters Ate My Condo was an iOS tile-matching video game developed by PikPok and released on September 15, 2011 by Adult Swim Games for $0.99. A sequel, Super Monsters Ate My Condo, was released in 2012.
Note: I did not test/check/scan any of the files I’m pointing to!
Found these APKs for SMAMC to sideload on Android: apkcombo / apkmonk
And this modded SMAMC APK (unlimited money): happymod
Also this IPA for (older?) iPhones: archive.org
Bonus: MAMC APK: apkcombo
Bonus: MAMC modded APK: happymod
Android games are different because old ones use currently unsupported libraries, and you’re not supposed to run old versions of android. That’s more a problem with how Google thinks android has to work.
PC games and PlayStation store games don’t really make sense to de-list like this because win10 is very backwards-compatible with software, and PS4/PS5 games that are released and work don’t need any upkeep.
Why do they do this? It doesn’t make sense. They don’t have to pay to keep it listed.
If it’s “failed” they can write off the investment as a loss. They get a tax break as a result. Capitalism rewards innovation (in tax avoidance), after all.
I don’t know if I want to upvote or downvote this comment lol
WHAT? THE FREE MARKET GIVES TAX BREAKS TO CORPOS WHEN THEY LOSE MONEY??? I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED BUT I’M MAD
Youre might be right right thats what theyre trying to doz but thats not how that works with complete games that have been released for ages. They’re just being retarded.
More than likely they just want to shut down the entire publishing arm and going full scorched earth is the only way they seem to do things
If that were the case there would at least be some value in selling the division to another company. Perhaps by not selling it they can claim the division lost money, artificially reducing the tax burden on profits from divisions corporate management is more interested in.
Thats not really how tax breaks work though. Especially not corporate ones.
I read it was so they can fire the people whose job it was to pay the creators of the games.
Rights should go back to the devs from the publisher at that point, or full public domain if they don’t want to distribute it either.
Even if WB pursues Erasure, we will Always have these games in our heart.
And our harddrives ;)
Lol good luck erasing the thousands of torrents of these games, piracy makes deleting something impossible, but im sure theyll try!
didn’t think it was possible to be worse than aol time warner but zazlav did it.
Why??
