Warner Bros. is now erasing games as it plans to delist Adult Swim-published titles
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/its-kind-of-depressing-wb-discovery-pulls-indie-game-for-business-changes/
Why would anybody work with Warner brothers now.
IIRC Steam lets people who purchased (or rather add to their library) a game access to it indefinitely. A famous example was second party side-scrolling half-life game named Codename Gordon. It's delisted but still available with the right steam command. I personally also have a source mod on steam on my account where it had been delisted due to potential lawsuit but I can still play it if I wanted.
That has definitely been the case with at least some games in the past that publishers removed. I am not aware of any cases where a game that someone purchased stops being available.
That being said, I kind of suspect that if it's not possible to buy it any more, an existing player probably isn't going to be getting much by way of any fixes at that point, but that's gonna be the case for any game at some point.
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.
Nice! I've got the 2 Disc collector edition DVD set.
Harvey Weinstein is 71. As soon as he's dead, Kevin Smith will buy the rights and you'll be able to buy it.
https://youtu.be/2_DOt1aHjhs?si=bM-2CphP8NDzGeRd
Akira Toriyama died at 68 and Rupert Mudoch is still alive at 92. Don't assume Kevin will outlast piece of shit Weinstein.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/2_DOt1aHjhs?si=bM-2CphP8NDzGeRd
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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)
But the version does matter. We all have a game that was updated that either broke it, removed content, or changed it so drastically that it's like a completely different game. And if the older versions aren't available, but the game is still being sold.... should the older version be public domain whole the current version is being sold?
These are important questions.
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
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
The second part of this comment doesn't make a lot of sense.
My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.
The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.
A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:
So obviously this example was fraudulous. It's possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.
Maybe something more scummy was at play?
Who knows.
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.
The NFL is a non profit, the teams are not. It still doesn't make it right, though.
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...
Exactly. I left that part off since I thought it was already a long description. But completely true. Can’t pay out an actor that takes a percentage if it never made any money on the “official” paper.
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.
It's crazy that WB is getting away with blatant tax fraud. I can't claim my house is worth $0 in order to pay no taxes yet WB can say, "This media is worth $0 for tax purposes."
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 clause allowing games to be removed from a group of people:
Since everything is going digital, it seems the only way to actually control the things you want is to pirate them.
Physical media is the only way to ensure you retain access to it.
I disagree. Piracy is the answer IMO.
as someone else said, invasive DRM exists on discs too
discs can't store enough data for a lot of modern games, necessitating downloads anyway
discs can be damaged, lost, or stolen
The only way to ensure we still have access to this stuff in the future is a healthy cracking and pirating community.
How do you backup the game you pirated so you'll still have it in 20 years.
Like any media/data you want to store indefinitely: build/buy a NAS with enough storage.
That's what in saying, you store it on media you control. If you need to migrate it every decade or so to avoid loss/degradation so be it. Unless you physically have that data it's not yours and access can be lost at any time.
I was oblivious to some context in the thread.
Agreed, a single physical copy can easily be lost.
Making physical copies often requires cracking/piracy. E.g. in my jurisdiction it's illegal to circumvent "functional" copy protection, even though the right for a private copy is written in law. The problem is courts consider DVD's long broken copy protections functional.
This is why in my opinion physical copies and piracy/cracking go hand in hand. The former isn't possible without the latter.
E.g. I bought Lego Star: TCS again on Steam, because it was less work than getting rid of the copy protection on the disk.
Same as you would with any other data.
Although it'd matter much less if you know you can just pirate it again in the event of you doing no backups and losing the data.
discs are a personal archiving solution (quite a bad one too, unless you're into m-discs n stuff) and do not solve the data accessibility issue (copying it is labor intensive and needs human interaction, in contrast to a torrent)
It's why I see ed2k better than torrent for this purpose.
No, you don't. Games can include online-checks via company servers. If those shut down, some of your games cannot dial home anymore and will not start. Then you got useless discs lying around.
Piracy solves that issue, so for this kind of situation, the only way is piracy. I know some people like to stay within legal limits but that's not a fair playing field at all for the consumer.
I didn't say anything about purchasing the media only that a physical copy is the only way to ensure you retain access. Online checks are trivial to bypass (see: them being bypassed constantly.)
How do you back up the games you've pirated if not to a physical media? Further "physical media" doesn't mean "only dvds" but means "hdds" as well. Some of you people are just so eager to argue and correct someone you don't even think about the comment you're replying to, have fun with that.
edit: I'm not arguing against piracy, I'm arguing for making backups and not assuming that torrent (or infrastructure to activate software) will always be there. Unless you control the data (physically) it's not yours.
(Aside from the other issues) A DVD may not even retain it for 15 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#Longevity
Hardly something to bet on for continued availability.
Just a side note that M-DISC exists which is essentially a blue ray disk with a claimed longevity of a thousand years (strong emphasis on "claimed". there's a lot of controversy around it)
but yes the only way to retain access is piracy as it allows people that didn't have the media to get it
It's weird to me that apparently nobody backs up their pirated stuff and just assumes they'll able to torrent it again in 10 years.
I get it about stuff that you don't really care about But if I spend a day looking for a specific movie, I'm taking it to my grave
Thanks for reminding me I need to try mdisc. I have multiple redundant backups but don't trust any of them for long term. (Hard drive, SSD flash, USB flash)
My carefully burned DVDs are going bad after 15 years just like you said. (They were checked for pio errors at time of burn using only verbatim azzo 100 year media and stored in my basement in black dvd cases.)
I really need to test them as well. Being ~100GB each is quite good for me, I won't need more than 100 for my whole life
I have some laserdiscs that are ~40 years old and still play fine.
Some things have no physical media, thus bringing it back to piracy as the only viable alternative yet again
Do you not back that thing up once you have it?
edit: it's assumed you pirated it initially as this is a piracy magazine.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by magazine, feel free to expand. I'll answer the party I can though... I back up certain media to an additional hard drive, but not everything. Some movies, all music, and some old comic books and magazines (Savage Sword of Conan, and it's like).
Every bit of physical media I have is also backed up digitally, because I don't even watch physical media anymore.
I dont really have a point to make, just writing out my thoughts.
Magazine is just the nomenclature in the fediverse, this is a "magazine" not a subreddit.
I back up pretty much everything, I guess a lot of the confusion is based on my phrasing, I was considering a RAID in your closet a physical backup while obviously the media there is being stored digitally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Announcing your sarcasm defeats sarcasm. If your sarcasm can't be inferred through context or some other means, the solution is simple...just don't be sarcastic.
Right. Thank God Shakespeare added /s to his plays.
Plays include tone from the actors. Similarly, books include tone from context. One sentence does not.
So, use more than one sentence.
I recommend you learn how to understand context. Otherwise I can't help you with basic language skills.
I recommend you learn how to make an argument that actually suits the context before commenting on the media literacy of others.
🤡
He actually did. Shakespeare's plays are meant to be portrayed by actors and not read as a book, so there is plenty of written notes for how the actors should be expressing when they say their lines.
Ah yes, because something you know ahead of time is a comedy/tragegy/what have you is totally the same as randoms on the internet
How do you know that, though?
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.
AFAIK none of my steam games are only accessible through steam servers. All of my games are installed on-site in my HDD and I really don't think Steam can uninstall them without my knowledge or consent. E.g. I can play any one of my games without an internet connection.
Any game that uses Steamworks or other DRM will not be playable offline (without first putting Steam into offline mode, for Steamworks games, maybe others).
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.
I keep hearing the most out of touch arguments for not owning what you buy, this being one of them.
Again, you buy something, you own it. I dont give a damn what the company thinks about that and if „resale“ works well or not. I buy game, after use, I sell it. Returning a game that isnt for you is separate.
You bought an exclusive license to play their game, they retain ownership of the digital information and in some cases the actual physical media. Actual ownership has been 'dead' for a long time now. I don't like it. Yes, buy elsewhere if you can but we're already past the point of consumers being able to influence this outcome with companies legally able to redefine "own" and "buy" via their ToS (not really visible to the consumer) to mean whatever best suits them.
I dont know why you feel the need to elaborate on this. I didnt ask. I know that this exists and it should be illegal. As I said, I hope the EU goes after this hard.
Also, the DMA is a big fuck you to all the „vote with your feet“ folks that try to shift blame to consumers. „No, it was actually the company responsible“. I loved that and hope this will go on.
Honestly! Not sure. 🤷♂️
In the EU at least, companies can say whatever they want in their ToS, it doesn't change the fact that you legally own your digital games
Must be nice 😭
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
didn't think it was possible to be worse than aol time warner but zazlav did it.
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
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 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.
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:
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!
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?)?
archive the shit out of all the games
Why??
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.
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?
While I kinda agree, you can still kill switch consoles and physical games with software easily. This is why I prefer buying off gog
Better still, stick with DRM free games.