Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

10mo ago

Warner Bros. is now erasing games as it plans to delist Adult Swim-published titles

www.polygon.com Warner Bros. is now erasing games as it plans to delist Adult Swim-published titles

A long list of Adult Swim Games is being pulled from Steam and console stores

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.

229 comments

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"
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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
  https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/its-kind-of-depressing-wb-discovery-pulls-indie-game-for-business-changes/
- pirate stuff you want to preserve

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

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.
- 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)

They don't realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
- 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
  
  Why do you think step 4 will happen?
- They know. They will sue.
- 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.

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.
  
  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.
- https://mander.xyz/post/5948544
  
  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.
- 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.

... 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.
  
  You speak one of the scariest truths there is.
  
  Sometimes I feel I'm fortunate to have ADHD. Until I think about my life not on the Web.
  
  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.
- 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).
  
  Making money by destroying/burying digital media. What a backwards world we live in...
- 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.
- Tax fraud, baby

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.
  
  You clearly have no idea what a tax write off is. If you get 50$ profit spend 25$ on your business and pocket 25$ you pay taxes on your pocketed 25$ not the companies expenditures. That is a tax write off. A "company" doesn't pay taxes.
- 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.
  
  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...
- 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.
- 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.

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.

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.

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.

Relevant link for Small Radios Big Televisions.

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.

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.

They Want To Erase History.
They are Burning The Books.

...and of course Duck Game never got released on GoG
Fuck this greedy bullshit

Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation

Finally someone is standing up to the woke mob. Thank you, WB conglomerate! You are the true underdog.
- I wish more people left the /s off.
  
  With Poes Law and all it's kinda dumb to do that. Without hearing the tone it's too easy to think they're seriously stupid.

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)

As if I'd need any additional reason to not buy Warner Bros games. So stupid of them.

Not sure whether they will remove it entirely or just delist it. I love Steam and the convenience of it and the majority of my games are on Steam. But this is why we should be able to own our games. You never know when your favorite game decides to do something like this.
- I don't think any games have been completely removed from Steam. In cases like this, they stop new purchases, but anyone who already has it keeps it.
  
  This comment seems to imply that at least some titles won't function after the delisting, perhaps related to servers, perhaps not.
- 99% of games you can install in its own folder and run forever (thus own it forever) And like the other person said games you own on steam are there after they've stopped being sold if you already own it. I have a few that don't exist in the store anymore.
  Shit practices like devs replacing games with new ones is a lot harder to circumvent though.
- The largest issue is resale imo. If a game just isnt for me, I should be able to resell it. I hope the EU goes after this topic in the future.
  
  The problem is, that doesn't make sense for digital media. A large part of resales is media degradation. You pay less, but you take a risk upon yourself for it. Being able to refund a game that isn't for you seems fair, though.

Drink up me hearties yo ho

WB: "we hate money"
- Hopefully not for long given all their recent terrible decisions.

When something gets removed from steam and it's in your steam library but not installed, is it gone forever?
- No, people just can't buy it anymore.
- You can still install and play it. If it has cards you can earn them and get account xp from making sets of them, same with emotes and wallpapers. You can't sell (or buy, obviously) any of that on the Steam marketplace though, but can still trade them. Achievements get a little wonky.
  Source: I own Transformers: Devastation, which was delisted.
  
  I'm so happy about steam's monopoly. I almost feel like they're there for us, they broke capitalism

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

didn't think it was possible to be worse than aol time warner but zazlav did it.

That's all, folks!

Why do they do this? It doesn't make sense. They don't have to pay to keep it listed.
- 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.
  
  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 removed.
  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
  
  WHAT? THE FREE MARKET GIVES TAX BREAKS TO CORPOS WHEN THEY LOSE MONEY????? I DON'T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED BUT I'M MAD
  
  I don't know if I want to upvote or downvote this comment lol
- 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.

Even if WB pursues Erasure, we will Always have these games in our heart.
- And our harddrives ;)

They already have. Can you install Super Monsters Ate My Condo? Released 10 years ago, great android game, gone now.
- 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.
- 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
- Never heard of it, is it zombies ate my friends?
  https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zombies+ate+my+condo+apk&t=fpas&ia=web

Not hemp tycoon!

archive the shit out of all the games

Okay I (don't, actually but whatevs) understand how you can do some tax-swindle capitalist-bs with unrealised stuff but how are they making money from "retiring" games (and is it the same scam as with the animated shows that you can only watch now if you sail the high seas?)?

WB like
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  WB like
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Why??

If you're buying games these days, STOP buying non physical media
- I bought GTA 5 as a disc back then. You can't even install it without the Rockstar Game Launcher. What do the discs do for me?
  
  I was going to say that the discs at least have a full game on them already, but can you even play that retail version without being forced through all the updates?
- Better still, stick with DRM free games.
- While I kinda agree, you can still kill switch consoles and physical games with software easily. This is why I prefer buying off gog

229 comments