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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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 🙄
… 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.
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.
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?
Tax fraud, baby
They don’t realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
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They’re probably betting on the majority of zoomers being too tech illiterate to know how to pirate having raised them on streaming.
I guess we will see if they are right.
Millennials were raised on VHS tapes and we could figure out Limewire. I doubt this is going to work out well for the studios.
Meh, many X, Millennial and Z that I know are clueless - they only know what the lock-down mobile device let’s them see.
It’s pretty sad, especially since X grew up before all this stuff.
Theres always been techy and non-techy people
I’m a Zoomer with a Dell Optiplex running Ubuntu server, an 18 TB HDD, and 35 years of combined seed time. I’ll let you fill in the gaps. Many of us are extremely tech literate and often share our Plex/Jellyfin instances with friends. Many of these not-so-etch-literate friends ask how they can do this for themselves using their computers and we shoot them over instructions.
Piracy is infinitely easier/more accessible than ever. It’s spreading like wildfire and thanks to the FOSS community anyone with a spare evening can get themselves up and running very quickly.
Step 1 - Push people to piracy.
Step 2 - Complain to lawmakers about rampant piracy.
Step 3 - Get governments to outlaw and shut down piracy sources, compatible technologies, and generally force more authoritarian standards and laws.
Step 4 - P2P starts to die. Piracy starts to condense around large hubs.
Step 5 - Make money suing the only large hubs of piracy that still exist, and shut them down.
Step 6 - Profit from lack of competition and ability to force DRM into everything.
Chopping the heads off the hydra will kill it this time, for sure
Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.
It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.
That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.
The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.
You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.
Why do you think step 4 will happen?
It already is. For example, it’s basically impossible to run your own email server these days, because most big email providers just block residential IPs to reduce spam.
Lots of ISPs block or heavily filter things like torrents.
Your ISP might decide you having a personal server at home is against their terms and force you to make a business account. They don’t want people uploading, only downloading.
Some countries are trying to weaken or ban encryption across the board.
And this is only slightly related, but things like websites that let you watch movies or shows are dying. They either all share the same server for video, or they just copy the files from each other. If you find one and watch a video with a little glitch, you’re likely to find that same glitch in all the other websites too. Think things like TV logos, audio suddenly changing language for a few seconds, scan lines on old VHS or TV recordings, etc… There used to be a lot, but now all the small players are being sued or shut down, and only the largest ones are still alive. The noose is tightening.
Because of Step 3.
Anti porn laws, “child protection” laws, cryptographic attestation of client devices (windows 11 TPM requirement anyone), it’s all headed in a very scary authoritarian direction
Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.
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That’s because they are gonna succeed where others have failed, lunch their own game store /s
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.
Piracy has been legitimized by corporate lies about the free market.
I’ve never encountered a better argument for piracy and drm-free content than abandonware
There should be a law in the United States - if you stop selling it, 1 year later you lose your copyright and it becomes public domain.
If you can remove content from the marketplace for a tax write off, the removed content should become public property.
That actually makes a ton of sense. We fucking paid for it after all.
Yeah. I’ve heard multiple times how entire careers are made supporting abandonware. The US military I believe pays microsoft millions a year to add security updates to their own version of Windows XP so old software can keep working.
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”
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.
Yet another reason piracy is right and just
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.
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,
Finally someone is standing up to the woke mob. Thank you, WB conglomerate! You are the true underdog.
I wish more people left the /s off.
With Poes Law and all it’s kinda dumb to do that. Without hearing the tone it’s too easy to think they’re seriously stupid.
Right. Thank God Shakespeare added /s to his plays.
Plays include tone from the actors. Similarly, books include tone from context. One sentence does not.
Similarly, books include tone from context. One sentence does not.
So, use more than one sentence.
Not sure whether they will remove it entirely or just delist it. I love Steam and the convenience of it and the majority of my games are on Steam. But this is why we should be able to own our games. You never know when your favorite game decides to do something like this.
I don’t think any games have been completely removed from Steam. In cases like this, they stop new purchases, but anyone who already has it keeps it.
This comment seems to imply that at least some titles won’t function after the delisting, perhaps related to servers, perhaps not.
AFAIK none of my steam games are only accessible through steam servers. All of my games are installed on-site in my HDD and I really don’t think Steam can uninstall them without my knowledge or consent. E.g. I can play any one of my games without an internet connection.
Any game that uses Steamworks or other DRM will not be playable offline (without first putting Steam into offline mode, for Steamworks games, maybe others).
