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.
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.
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 🤦
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’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.
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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.
So the issue is about having DRM, not whether it’s sold on physical media or not. Digital games don’t necessarily need to have DRM either.
How’s this for digital rights management: Warner Bros is erasing games from online retailers entirely. Which they cannot do with physical media.
You must have forgotten where you even were.
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
I was talking about how this would happen for about a decade, since the decline of popularity of physical media. Nobody listens.