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.
… 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.
Sometimes I feel I’m fortunate to have ADHD. Until I think about my life not on the Web.
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.
Tax fraud, baby
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.
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.
Making money by destroying/burying digital media. What a backwards world we live in…
Even worse, only to appease shareholders that are only after short term gains and might even bet on the company failing.
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?
Quintopoly right now, Quadopoly if WBD gets acquired. Probably a Triopoly or Duopoly fairly soon after that.
But we have antitrust laws and everything!
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.
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. 🤷♂️
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
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.
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).
deleted by creator
Physical media is the only way to ensure you retain access to it.
Some things have no physical media, thus bringing it back to piracy as the only viable alternative yet again
Do you not back that thing up once you have it?
edit: it’s assumed you pirated it initially as this is a piracy magazine.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by magazine, feel free to expand. I’ll answer the party I can though… I back up certain media to an additional hard drive, but not everything. Some movies, all music, and some old comic books and magazines (Savage Sword of Conan, and it’s like).
Every bit of physical media I have is also backed up digitally, because I don’t even watch physical media anymore.
I dont really have a point to make, just writing out my thoughts.
Magazine is just the nomenclature in the fediverse, this is a “magazine” not a subreddit.
I back up pretty much everything, I guess a lot of the confusion is based on my phrasing, I was considering a RAID in your closet a physical backup while obviously the media there is being stored digitally.
(Aside from the other issues) A DVD may not even retain it for 15 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#Longevity
Hardly something to bet on for continued availability.
Just a side note that M-DISC exists which is essentially a blue ray disk with a claimed longevity of a thousand years (strong emphasis on “claimed”. there’s a lot of controversy around it)
but yes the only way to retain access is piracy as it allows people that didn’t have the media to get it
Thanks for reminding me I need to try mdisc. I have multiple redundant backups but don’t trust any of them for long term. (Hard drive, SSD flash, USB flash)
My carefully burned DVDs are going bad after 15 years just like you said. (They were checked for pio errors at time of burn using only verbatim azzo 100 year media and stored in my basement in black dvd cases.)
I really need to test them as well. Being ~100GB each is quite good for me, I won’t need more than 100 for my whole life
It’s weird to me that apparently nobody backs up their pirated stuff and just assumes they’ll able to torrent it again in 10 years.
I disagree. Piracy is the answer IMO.
-
as someone else said, invasive DRM exists on discs too
-
discs can’t store enough data for a lot of modern games, necessitating downloads anyway
-
discs can be damaged, lost, or stolen
The only way to ensure we still have access to this stuff in the future is a healthy cracking and pirating community.
How do you backup the game you pirated so you’ll still have it in 20 years.
Like any media/data you want to store indefinitely: build/buy a NAS with enough storage.
That’s what in saying, you store it on media you control. If you need to migrate it every decade or so to avoid loss/degradation so be it. Unless you physically have that data it’s not yours and access can be lost at any time.
I was oblivious to some context in the thread.
Agreed, a single physical copy can easily be lost.
Making physical copies often requires cracking/piracy. E.g. in my jurisdiction it’s illegal to circumvent “functional” copy protection, even though the right for a private copy is written in law. The problem is courts consider DVD’s long broken copy protections functional.
This is why in my opinion physical copies and piracy/cracking go hand in hand. The former isn’t possible without the latter.
E.g. I bought Lego Star: TCS again on Steam, because it was less work than getting rid of the copy protection on the disk.
discs are a personal archiving solution (quite a bad one too, unless you’re into m-discs n stuff) and do not solve the data accessibility issue (copying it is labor intensive and needs human interaction, in contrast to a torrent)
It’s why I see ed2k better than torrent for this purpose.
-
No, you don’t. Games can include online-checks via company servers. If those shut down, some of your games cannot dial home anymore and will not start. Then you got useless discs lying around.
Piracy solves that issue, so for this kind of situation, the only way is piracy. I know some people like to stay within legal limits but that’s not a fair playing field at all for the consumer.
I didn’t say anything about purchasing the media only that a physical copy is the only way to ensure you retain access. Online checks are trivial to bypass (see: them being bypassed constantly.)
How do you back up the games you’ve pirated if not to a physical media? Further “physical media” doesn’t mean “only dvds” but means “hdds” as well. Some of you people are just so eager to argue and correct someone you don’t even think about the comment you’re replying to, have fun with that.
edit: I’m not arguing against piracy, I’m arguing for making backups and not assuming that torrent (or infrastructure to activate software) will always be there. Unless you control the data (physically) it’s not yours.
My hatred of WB goes back to when the purposely released a completely broken Arkham Knight game on PC. It has only grown more recently, I really wanted to watch that Acme vs Coyote movie. I hope to see a leak one day maybe.
If you’re buying games these days, STOP buying non physical media
Better still, stick with DRM free games.
While I kinda agree, you can still kill switch consoles and physical games with software easily. This is why I prefer buying off gog
I bought GTA 5 as a disc back then. You can’t even install it without the Rockstar Game Launcher. What do the discs do for me?
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.
pirate stuff you want to preserve
At least the developer for Small Tapes 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
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.
Why would anybody work with Warner brothers now.
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 🙄
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.
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.
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 was talking about how this would happen for about a decade, since the decline of popularity of physical media. Nobody listens.
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.
Steam also gives you the option to archive your games in a format compatible with dvds.
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
That’s all, folks!
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.
These aren’t even games they (warn a brotha) own. Just a handful of games released through adult swim made and owned by other people.
Relevant link for Small Radios Big Televisions.
They don’t realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
They know. They will sue.
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?
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation
Drink up me hearties yo ho
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, books include tone from context. One sentence does not.
So, use more than one sentence.
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?
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?
Tax codes and capitalism at it finest. Companies gonna company
Yeah, this reeks of the Disney need last year about removing a show they own from their platform so they can write it off as a loss and/or to stop paying residuals.
Residuals.
That’s is right there.
Push consumers into the next thing, which will have less residual cost or even none thanks to AI (that’s the thought process, we’ll see if it works)
Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.
wasnt there a case where a very rare film was found thanks to torrents? Or a book? I dont quite remember but if I recall correctly it boosted the popularity and image of piracy?
