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.
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
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
Warnerbros be like
I believe the text here is:
“Pay for our product”
“Make your product available for purchase”
Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation
…and of course Duck Game never got released on GoG
Fuck this greedy bullshit
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
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,
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
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.
The largest issue is resale imo. If a game just isnt for me, I should be able to resell it. I hope the EU goes after this topic in the future.
The problem is, that doesn’t make sense for digital media. A large part of resales is media degradation. You pay less, but you take a risk upon yourself for it. Being able to refund a game that isn’t for you seems fair, though.
I keep hearing the most out of touch arguments for not owning what you buy, this being one of them.
Again, you buy something, you own it. I dont give a damn what the company thinks about that and if „resale“ works well or not. I buy game, after use, I sell it. Returning a game that isnt for you is separate.
You bought an exclusive license to play their game, they retain ownership of the digital information and in some cases the actual physical media. Actual ownership has been ‘dead’ for a long time now. I don’t like it. Yes, buy elsewhere if you can but we’re already past the point of consumers being able to influence this outcome with companies legally able to redefine “own” and “buy” via their ToS (not really visible to the consumer) to mean whatever best suits them.
In the EU at least, companies can say whatever they want in their ToS, it doesn’t change the fact that you legally own your digital games
I dont know why you feel the need to elaborate on this. I didnt ask. I know that this exists and it should be illegal. As I said, I hope the EU goes after this hard.
Also, the DMA is a big fuck you to all the „vote with your feet“ folks that try to shift blame to consumers. „No, it was actually the company responsible“. I loved that and hope this will go on.
Honestly! Not sure. 🤷♂️
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).
99% of games you can install in its own folder and run forever (thus own it forever) And like the other person said games you own on steam are there after they’ve stopped being sold if you already own it. I have a few that don’t exist in the store anymore.
Shit practices like devs replacing games with new ones is a lot harder to circumvent though.
They don’t realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
In the wise words of Gaben: "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.”
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
Why do you think step 4 will happen?
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
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.
It’s a sign of the brain drain at large media companies that a little over a decade ago, the major 4 TV networks made Hulu, which was free with ads, because they realized that people can just pirate this stuff if you’re a dick about distribution – and now 100% of everyone’s media strategy is “be a dick about distribution.”
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.
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.
You’re forgetting the part where you’re the extreme minority and so you don’t really matter much to the market.
I learned how to use bit torrent in an afternoon on summer break in high school. Zoomers will figure it out and there are enough of us older millennials around to teach them as well.
Millennials were raised on VHS tapes and we could figure out Limewire. I doubt this is going to work out well for them.
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
You can teach kids to use tech though, i was taught how to break drms on dvds when i was around ten then how to burn it onto a dvd. It was litteraly rent a movie from hollywood video put it in the computer, open up one program and select movie hit go. When it was finished hit save, replace the movie with a blank disc, then open another program select what was saved and hit go again. Very easy, i didnt understand a thing of what i was doing and it was set up by my uncle but clearly you can teach stupid kids to do anything.
Abandonware has been a thing for a long time.
This is not abandonware. The devs haven’t abandoned their games. This is an active and purposeful fuck you from the publisher to the devs.
It costs them literally nothing to keep those games up, and yet they’re taking them down against the devs’ wishes. In fact, they refuse to be the least bit convenient to the devs, making them jump through hoops just to relist their own games.
They know. They will sue.
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.
He actually did. Shakespeare’s plays are meant to be portrayed by actors and not read as a book, so there is plenty of written notes for how the actors should be expressing when they say their lines.
Plays include tone from the actors. Similarly, books include tone from context. One sentence does not.
I recommend you learn how to understand context. Otherwise I can’t help you with basic language skills.
I recommend you learn how to make an argument that actually suits the context before commenting on the media literacy of others.
🤡
You mad you can’t grasp English?
Similarly, books include tone from context. One sentence does not.
So, use more than one sentence.
Ah yes, because something you know ahead of time is a comedy/tragegy/what have you is totally the same as randoms on the internet
How do you know that, though?
Announcing your sarcasm defeats sarcasm. If your sarcasm can’t be inferred through context or some other means, the solution is simple…just don’t be sarcastic.
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.
Why??
That’s all, folks!
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.
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.
Nice! I’ve got the 2 Disc collector edition DVD set.
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.
Drink up me hearties yo ho
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.
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.
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.
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 $500 million at the box office “barely broke even”.
Might be off on the layers, but I heard that description of movie accounting years ago.
Nice write up. Crazy how fat cats find ways to milk the cash cows.
I’m reminded of how the freaking NFL of all things is considered a non profit somehow. Simply due to the fact that they pay themselves so much money.
The NFL is a non profit, the teams are not. It still doesn’t make it right, though.
It’s also how the studios fuck over anyone involved who had “profit share %” in their contract.
The marketing costs eat up 100% of the profits, movie makes no money, yet the marketing company the advertising was sold to made half a bill…
It’s just a lie told often enough it became true.
Don’t believe everything you read on forums and try to research things for yourself.
They are losing money on streaming. It was so bad that they took their cash cow HBO and grouped it with their streaming divisions to improve their financial report. WBD is making insane decisions because their #1 goal is to increase free cash flow to pay off their debts, whereas most companies’ #1 goal is to “increase shareholder value.”
if you write it off as a tax write off you get to lie about “expected viewership” rather than actual viewership
You can’t write off expected future profits. That would essentially make income taxes meaningless. You can use a depreciation schedule for movies that you’ve produced and spread your tax savings out if you want(and you can avoid doing that by cancelling the movie all together and claiming it on your taxes now as a deduction), but that only matters when you’re actually making future money for the movie that you want to reduce your tax burden on. WB is losing a hell of a lot of money in the future to save money right now.
You clearly have no idea what a tax write off is. If you get 50$ 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.
