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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Tax fraud, baby