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.
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”
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.
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.
It was the point of software as a service and DRM
I was talking about how this would happen for about a decade, since the decline of popularity of physical media. Nobody listens.
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 🙄
At least the developer for Small Radios 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
Why would anybody work with Warner brothers now.
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.
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That’s because they are gonna succeed where others have failed, lunch their own game store /s
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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.
Tax write off like the movies and tv shows.
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.
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.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
This is the way
The US won’t. The EU probably will.
It exists, but isn’t 1 year. Closer to 20 I think? There are also deals that require constant usage, like Sony’s hold on spiderman. Quick search says 5 years 9 months for them to hold on to it.
Back to copyright, there was a game Wizards of the Coast acquired from Gygax’s company that a neonazi and one of Gygax’s sons tried to use claiming WoTC abandoned it. It was blatantly racist so one of the few times people were rooting for WoTC to win. WoTC hadn’t made a new game, but claimed they were still selling manuals digitally.
Edit might be trademark rather than copyright.
It could be trademark, certainly isn’t copyright. Trademark is use it and defend it, or lose it. Common trademarks that were lost are kleenex (tissue) and band-aid (bandage). Patents vary somewhat by industry, but in the computer world last 20 years. I think copyright is up to life of the creator plus 70 years, or 70 years if it’s owned by a company. This is why we hear about JRR Tolkiens kids having lawsuits about stuff related to LoTR, and why Steamboat Willy only recently went public domain.
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.
they pay a shitton of money to pull old devs out of retirement, because noone can code cobol on the required level anymore
But despite the fact we don’t want money for it we hate the idea of you getting it for free more
The disparity in wealth should shrink instead of grow.
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
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’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.
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.”
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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.
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”
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
Piracy has been legitimized by corporate lies about the free market.
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.
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.
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…
Exactly. I left that part off since I thought it was already a long description. But completely true. Can’t pay out an actor that takes a percentage if it never made any money on the “official” paper.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
I agree with you. If a company writes off something in order to make it with zero, then that thing should immediately fall into the public domain.
You would have to have another law that says that anything significantly devalued must be able to be purchased for the stated value. Otherwise they will just say it’s worth $1.
It’s crazy that WB is getting away with blatant tax fraud. I can’t claim my house is worth $0 in order to pay no taxes yet WB can say, “This media is worth $0 for tax purposes.”
i wonder if devs would rather have their work eventually erased like it never existed and never pirated or preserved and appreciated by people
Back when WB threatened to block the release of a finished series on HBO Max (Summer Camp Island), the creator more or less threatened to leak it herself. I think most devs would feel the same. At least I would. Not like it’s making them any money either way.
Zazlov: Gets $223M annual salary
If he gets $223M a year for being a detriment to society, I should be getting at least $446M for being relatively neutral.
This picture is kinda wimpy. Zaslav had led the company through a total stock drop of almost $16 per share yet his comp has gone up almost 100% based on the figures I’ve been able to find. Granted he’s not getting the lucrative options he started with but that doesn’t seem to stop the other comp from going up.
Since everything is going digital, it seems the only way to actually control the things you want is to pirate them.
Physical media is the only way to ensure you retain access to it.
I disagree. Piracy is the answer IMO.
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as someone else said, invasive DRM exists on discs too
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discs can’t store enough data for a lot of modern games, necessitating downloads anyway
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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.
Same as you would with any other data.
Although it’d matter much less if you know you can just pirate it again in the event of you doing no backups and losing the data.
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)
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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.
(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
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 get it about stuff that you don’t really care about But if I spend a day looking for a specific movie, I’m taking it to my grave
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
I have some laserdiscs that are ~40 years old and still play fine.
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.
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.
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
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,
Yet another reason piracy is right and just
I think even Gaben will approve
it makes sense that failing business would want to remove digital assets hosted somewhere else that can’t possibly lose them money
Revenue must be less than the benefit of the losses they’ll get a tax break on.
The system is broken.
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.
