A long list of Adult Swim Games is being pulled from Steam and console stores

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.

  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3212·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
      272·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
        4·
        8 months ago

        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 🙄

    • SeaJ@lemm.eeEnglish
      19·
      8 months ago

      At least the developer for Small Radios Big Televisions is handing it out for free now. Looks like a pretty decent game.

      • Grimpen@lemmy.caEnglish
        15·
        8 months ago

        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

        https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/its-kind-of-depressing-wb-discovery-pulls-indie-game-for-business-changes/

        • amanaftermidnight@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          8 months ago

          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.

          • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
            51·
            8 months ago

            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.