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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.

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[-] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 338 points 2 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.

[-] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 61 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 119 points 2 months ago

But digitizing does have some benefits, like bit-for-bit archival, usually by a "third party"

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[-] Catsrules@lemmy.ml 97 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 85 points 2 months ago

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 🤦

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[-] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 46 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

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[-] mudle@lemmy.ml 216 points 2 months ago

Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.

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[-] NoLifeKing@ani.social 171 points 2 months ago

Whoever takes games down without license problems is a gigantic dickhead and makes no sense, even from a economic perspective its idiotic.

[-] Redward@yiffit.net 57 points 2 months ago

That’s because they are gonna succeed where others have failed, lunch their own game store /s

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[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 148 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 63 points 2 months ago

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.

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[-] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 143 points 2 months ago

They don't realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.

[-] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 56 points 2 months ago

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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[-] 21Cabbage@lemmynsfw.com 137 points 2 months ago

I've never encountered a better argument for piracy and drm-free content than abandonware

[-] 4am@lemm.ee 65 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] NoSpiritAnimal@lemmy.world 80 points 2 months ago

If you can remove content from the marketplace for a tax write off, the removed content should become public property.

[-] CPMSP@midwest.social 45 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That actually makes a ton of sense. We fucking paid for it after all.

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[-] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 111 points 2 months ago

... why? They're complete products that just sit there and make money for almost no effort

[-] mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 37 points 2 months ago

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.

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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.

[-] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago

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).

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[-] brax@sh.itjust.works 100 points 2 months ago

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

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[-] ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world 96 points 2 months ago

Piracy has been legitimized by corporate lies about the free market.

[-] OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 89 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk 39 points 2 months ago

if you write it off as a tax write off you get to lie about "expected viewership" rather than actual viewership

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[-] kuraitengai@programming.dev 36 points 2 months ago

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.

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[-] Guntrigger@feddit.ch 85 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 29 points 2 months ago

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.

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[-] FreakinSteve@lemmy.world 71 points 2 months ago

Zazlov: Gets $223M annual salary

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[-] EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de 64 points 2 months ago

Since everything is going digital, it seems the only way to actually control the things you want is to pirate them.

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[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 63 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

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[-] Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 57 points 2 months ago

Yet another reason piracy is right and just

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 49 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] PhAzE@lemmy.ca 49 points 2 months ago

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.

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[-] nutsack@lemmy.world 49 points 2 months ago

it makes sense that failing business would want to remove digital assets hosted somewhere else that can't possibly lose them money

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[-] Telorand@reddthat.com 47 points 2 months ago
[-] N00dle@lemmy.world 37 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 36 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I kind of get retiring video IPs to save on residual payments, but games which are pay per download should always be revenue neutral at best. This just reeks of shitty culture war rebranding.

[-] electricprism@lemmy.ml 33 points 2 months ago

They Want To Erase History.

They are Burning The Books.

[-] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 32 points 2 months ago

...and of course Duck Game never got released on GoG

Fuck this greedy bullshit

[-] nieceandtows@lemmy.world 29 points 2 months ago

Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation

[-] Maoo@hexbear.net 28 points 2 months ago

Finally someone is standing up to the woke mob. Thank you, WB conglomerate! You are the true underdog.

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[-] adhdplantdev@lemm.ee 27 points 2 months ago

Tax codes and capitalism at it finest. Companies gonna company

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this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
983 points (99.2% liked)

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