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.
At least the developer for Small Radios Big Televisions is handing it out for free now. Looks like a pretty decent game.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
They don’t realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
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