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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🤦
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.
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.
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.
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 was talking about how this would happen for about a decade, since the decline of popularity of physical media. Nobody listens.
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 🙄
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
Why would anybody work with Warner brothers now.
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.
pirate stuff you want to preserve
Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.
Whoever takes games down without license problems is a gigantic dickhead and makes no sense, even from a economic perspective its idiotic.
That’s because they are gonna succeed where others have failed, lunch their own game store /s
If they do that they will look like the biggest clown ever.
Tax write off like the movies and tv shows.
Products no longer available to buy should fall into public domain.
WB are an absolute cancer. Suicide Squad fails spectacularly due to being a multiplayer live service game that nobody asked for, and their immediate response is to go all in on multiplayer live service games.
Because heaven forbid the executives could be fucking wrong.
If I can’t buy it, I will pirate it with zero moral issues.
I own over 1000 DVDs and a couple hundred BluRays, but will pirate anything that gets removed from streaming or isn’t available in my region for some shitty licensing reasons.
If you have a legitimate copy of Dogma (1999), put it into a fireproof safety box. That is a collectors item already, as they pulled production of the DVD copies after a rather limited run.
Harvey Weinstein is 71. As soon as he’s dead, Kevin Smith will buy the rights and you’ll be able to buy it.
Akira Toriyama died at 68 and Rupert Mudoch is still alive at 92. Don’t assume Kevin will outlast piece of shit Weinstein.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/2_DOt1aHjhs?si=bM-2CphP8NDzGeRd
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Look, I’m not outright disagreeing with your first point. I think going that way will be a massive legal headache for just about every business.
Mainly because of patents, copyright, and all the BS, but that’s a whole other thing. I’m mainly thinking about software.
New software v1.0 is released and then updated to v1.1? Is it a new product? If so, does that mean that v1.0 should be free if they only offer the updated version? What constitutes software not being available in a legal sense?
This is not a matter of versions. If the content is not available for purchase then the only choice is piracy. But at what point does piracy end and it just become public domain (not even legally just them not giving a fuck to go after anyone)
But the version does matter. We all have a game that was updated that either broke it, removed content, or changed it so drastically that it’s like a completely different game. And if the older versions aren’t available, but the game is still being sold… should the older version be public domain whole the current version is being sold?
These are important questions.
… why? They’re complete products that just sit there and make money for almost no effort
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Cool, then they won’t have any problems with everybody downloading them for free.
If they want to cry about lost revenue, then they can turn around and sue themselves for making the games unavailable
Warnerbros be like
I believe the text here is:
“Pay for our product”
“Make your product available for purchase”
exactly that, INCLUDING server-side binaries to re-create any online features
I could argue that the source code should become public domain as well but we already sound like crazy people
Piracy has been legitimized by corporate lies about the free market.
I honestly don’t understand the math of not releasing movies and un-releasing games. People say tax purposes but I’d think streaming is essentially pure profit, hard to imagine not being able to make 20% of your money back or whatever credit you get for taxes.
if you write it off as a tax write off you get to lie about “expected viewership” rather than actual viewership
You clearly have no idea what a tax write off is. If you get 50$ profit spend 25$ on your business and pocket 25$ you pay taxes on your pocketed 25$ not the companies expenditures. That is a tax write off. A “company” doesn’t pay taxes.
The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.
My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.
The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.
A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:
- I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
- I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
- Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
- On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.
So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.
Maybe something more scummy was at play?
Who knows.
You can’t write off expected future profits. That would essentially make income taxes meaningless. You can use a depreciation schedule for movies that you’ve produced and spread your tax savings out if you want(and you can avoid doing that by cancelling the movie all together and claiming it on your taxes now as a deduction), but that only matters when you’re actually making future money for the movie that you want to reduce your tax burden on. WB is losing a hell of a lot of money in the future to save money right now.
Think of it like Russian nesting dolls.
You got the production company that pays $100 million to make a movie. The production company is owned by a studio. Production company licenses the movie to the studio that owns it for $200 million. But it’s all the same ownership and no money changed hands. It’s just on paper. So now the $100 million movie cost $200 million. Then the studio licenses out the movie to the marketing company, which the studio also owns, for $300 million. Again no money changed hands and the value is all on paper.
Do that a couple more times and that’s how a movie that literally cost $100 million and made $500 million at the box office “barely broke even”.
Might be off on the layers, but I heard that description of movie accounting years ago.
Nice write up. Crazy how fat cats find ways to milk the cash cows.
I’m reminded of how the freaking NFL of all things is considered a non profit somehow. Simply due to the fact that they pay themselves so much money.
The NFL is a non profit, the teams are not. It still doesn’t make it right, though.
It’s also how the studios fuck over anyone involved who had “profit share %” in their contract.
The marketing costs eat up 100% of the profits, movie makes no money, yet the marketing company the advertising was sold to made half a bill…
Exactly. I left that part off since I thought it was already a long description. But completely true. Can’t pay out an actor that takes a percentage if it never made any money on the “official” paper.
Gotta get you hooked on the new drug that doesn’t have royalties they have to pay out.
They’re looking forward to all the AI generated crap, and the newer stuff they’ve already fucked the creators over in their contracts.
They are losing money on streaming. It was so bad that they took their cash cow HBO and grouped it with their streaming divisions to improve their financial report. WBD is making insane decisions because their #1 goal is to increase free cash flow to pay off their debts, whereas most companies’ #1 goal is to “increase shareholder value.”
A big part is also residuals, they don’t want to have to keep paying actors, directors, and others involved with production, after the fact on a losing property. If there is zero income there are zero continued payments.
This practice feels like something that should be illegal. Effectively it is destroying art that hundreds or thousands of people worked hard to make, for the sake of fiddling the books of the owning company that commissioned it.
If you “write it off” to be worth zero, it should either become freely available abandonware, or can be claimed as the intellectual property of those that worked on it. Otherwise it is evident that there is some value to be had and therefore tax fraud to claim it has none.
I agree with you. If a company writes off something in order to make it with zero, then that thing should immediately fall into the public domain.
You would have to have another law that says that anything significantly devalued must be able to be purchased for the stated value. Otherwise they will just say it’s worth $1.
It’s crazy that WB is getting away with blatant tax fraud. I can’t claim my house is worth $0 in order to pay no taxes yet WB can say, “This media is worth $0 for tax purposes.”
i wonder if devs would rather have their work eventually erased like it never existed and never pirated or preserved and appreciated by people
Back when WB threatened to block the release of a finished series on HBO Max (Summer Camp Island), the creator more or less threatened to leak it herself. I think most devs would feel the same. At least I would. Not like it’s making them any money either way.
Zazlov: Gets $223M annual salary
If he gets $223M a year for being a detriment to society, I should be getting at least $446M for being relatively neutral.
This picture is kinda wimpy. Zaslav had led the company through a total stock drop of almost $16 per share yet his comp has gone up almost 100% based on the figures I’ve been able to find. Granted he’s not getting the lucrative options he started with but that doesn’t seem to stop the other comp from going up.
Luckily Steam will keep Duck Game in my library, but I dread the moment Valve leadership changes. Steam has existed for 20 years, and I naively hope I’ll still be able to play my games in 40 years on my Steck Deck.
Well, since you retain a license to the content until you or valve closes your account, you should be covered.
According to their own personal Steam Subscriber Agreement, you only forfit licenses when you end your subscription (like EA Play) or when the main service contract ends (close your account).
Although they may try, but then you can still sue for breach of contract.
That’s as things may be now. What we have consistently seen is that company’s can often change their policy whenever they want. It’s happened too many times already to think the current lunch is future proof
Steam can remove games from your account. Their definition of a subscription is different than what you think it is:
the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as “Subscriptions.”
The clause allowing games to be removed from a group of people:
Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally,
Yet another reason piracy is right and just
I think even Gaben will approve
FUUUUUUCK DAVID ZASLAV!
He is not only hiding things people enjoy watching and playing, he is hiding history.
Imagine how much less we would know about Elizabethan England if all of Shakespeare’s plays were lost to all time.
it makes sense that failing business would want to remove digital assets hosted somewhere else that can’t possibly lose them money
Revenue must be less than the benefit of the losses they’ll get a tax break on.
The system is broken.
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.
