How does delisting a game make/save money?

It’s due to tax breaks. NPR did a piece on it. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143901911/popular-titles-are-vanishing-from-hbo-max-after-merger

Im not in the business, but i think they are playing the long game. People don't want to pay full price for an old game or a remaster. And unless there is a crazy fan base they won't get hyped about a remake of a game.

They want their new releases to not be competing with their older, cheaper games.

If I'm not mistaken, Steam will still keep the games on their servers. Sure, you can no longer buy them, but I'm pretty sure if you own the game you can still access it, and steam keys from the grey market should still work.

Copyright, licensing, and derivatives.

Many games, like GTA San Andreas, had licensing deals fall apart over time, and certain assets (like music) were removed and replaced.

When a game gets sold, the publisher has to figure out who all has to get paid, which means you're paying for people who work in accounting figuring out where all this money is supposed to go.

In other words, sometimes it's a lot cheaper to just not sell the game anymore.

GTA being a bad example with its popularity, but in another instance where assets need to be replaced, if its an unpopular game, easier to just delist it than pay someone to work on it and replace assets. Further, when you no longer have to pay other people for their involvement in the game or for licensing, suddenly you have fewer people you have to pay to do the job of figuring out where all the money goes.

Delisting frankly cuts costs across the board.

Based on what they've done in the past, they're going to write it off on their taxes when though the titles aren't even games that they own.

Corporations don't always have to make sense it looks like during a meeting they concluded that games don't generate significant profit so they decided to exit that entire market. They don't want to have any employees to look over the account, or having to update is something or have any lawsuits (perhaps have offended someone, or formatted computer), I am not saying those could happen or make any sense, but essentially execs say they don't want to have ANY liability and the lower employees comply the best they can.

Execs don't care about users, to them this is just business.

If users were priority company for example could just make the games public domain, but that would be too much work, and no way back if (in very unlikely case) they wanted to bring the games back.

Delisting is the end effect. They might have other contractual obligations that cost them money to license the game.

Taxes. When you have products sold you have to pay taxes on their commercialization and on the revenue they produce. By removing all sort of properties, from games to movies and series from distribution, WBD can write them off and thus reduce the tax amount they have to pay on them. This is just Warner addressing an internal liquidity and budget issue. They've been using this strategy for a year now because they were, according to them, short of cash. By removing old properties that are no longer selling well, they reduce the tax burden for more recent and profitable products. This of course sucks for users and consumers who can no longer access them on streaming or buy old games. But it effectively reduced their operating costs.

It sounds more like they're trying to close adult swim games.

And on top of the tax breaks everyone's talking about, they also don't have to keep developers, community staff, or support on the payroll anymore.