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.
WB: “we hate money”
Hopefully not for long given all their recent terrible decisions.
They already have. Can you install Super Monsters Ate My Condo? Released 10 years ago, great android game, gone now.
From wikipedia:
Monsters Ate My Condo was an iOS tile-matching video game developed by PikPok and released on September 15, 2011 by Adult Swim Games for $0.99. A sequel, Super Monsters Ate My Condo, was released in 2012.
Note: I did not test/check/scan any of the files I’m pointing to!
Found these APKs for SMAMC to sideload on Android: apkcombo / apkmonk
And this modded SMAMC APK (unlimited money): happymod
Also this IPA for (older?) iPhones: archive.org
Bonus: MAMC APK: apkcombo
Bonus: MAMC modded APK: happymod
Android games are different because old ones use currently unsupported libraries, and you’re not supposed to run old versions of android. That’s more a problem with how Google thinks android has to work.
PC games and PlayStation store games don’t really make sense to de-list like this because win10 is very backwards-compatible with software, and PS4/PS5 games that are released and work don’t need any upkeep.
Never heard of it, is it zombies ate my friends?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zombies+ate+my+condo+apk&t=fpas&ia=web
Zazlov: Gets $223M annual salary
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.
If he gets $223M a year for being a detriment to society, I should be getting at least $446M for being relatively neutral.
I loved adult swim flash games in the 2000s would have definitely cared about this a lot more if flash wasn’t already dead and they weren’t preserved on internet archive and flashpoint
They don’t realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
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.
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
Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.
It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.
That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.
The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.
You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.
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.
They know. They will sue.
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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.
Not hemp tycoon!
… why? They’re complete products that just sit there and make money for almost no effort
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.
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!
Normies at this point are trained like Pavlov’s dogs to ignore the very possibility to treat these big companies as they should be treated by law.
They are irrationally afraid that Earth will split in half and become infested by goblins if there’s no Apple, just separate Apple Computer, Apple Mobile, Apple Music, Apple TV, Applesoft - I want to see this - and so on, no Google, just separate Google Search, Google Mobile, Googlesoft - ok, not as funny, - etc, Microsoft is a small company and there are also Microhard and Microcloud …
Apocalypse didn’t happen when AT&T was broken up. Nokia wasn’t broken up by regulators, but that didn’t lead to an apocalypse too, while still was a bad thing. DEC or Sun going down didn’t cause apocalypse.
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.
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.
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.
N-no, it’s happening too fast to be explained by recent evolution. It’s been there, just psychiatry has only recently become interested in people without hallucinations, inability to speak and murderous impulses.
I’d rather imagine that a population needs a certain proportion of explorers or people behaving more chaotically.
Tax fraud, baby
Tax codes and capitalism at it finest. Companies gonna company
Yeah, this reeks of the Disney news 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)
Why do they do this? It doesn’t make sense. They don’t have to pay to keep it listed.
I read it was so they can fire the people whose job it was to pay the creators of the games.
Rights should go back to the devs from the publisher at that point, or full public domain if they don’t want to distribute it either.
If it’s “failed” they can write off the investment as a loss. They get a tax break as a result. Capitalism rewards innovation (in tax avoidance), after all.
WHAT? THE FREE MARKET GIVES TAX BREAKS TO CORPOS WHEN THEY LOSE MONEY??? I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED BUT I’M MAD
Youre might be right right thats what theyre trying to doz but thats not how that works with complete games that have been released for ages. They’re just being retarded.
More than likely they just want to shut down the entire publishing arm and going full scorched earth is the only way they seem to do things
If that were the case there would at least be some value in selling the division to another company. Perhaps by not selling it they can claim the division lost money, artificially reducing the tax burden on profits from divisions corporate management is more interested in.
Thats not really how tax breaks work though. Especially not corporate ones.
I don’t know if I want to upvote or downvote this comment lol
…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.
That’s all, folks!
Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.
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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
