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.

  • @AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
    111•8 months ago

    … why? They’re complete products that just sit there and make money for almost no effort

    • @mods_are_assholes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      36•8 months ago

      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.

        • @mods_are_assholes@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2•8 months ago

          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.

          • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1•8 months ago

            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.

            N-no, it’s happening too fast to be explained by recent evolution. It’s been there, just psychiatry has only recently become interested in people without hallucinations, inability to speak and murderous impulses.

            I’d rather imagine that a population needs a certain proportion of explorers or people behaving more chaotically.

      • @Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3•8 months ago

        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.

      • @CitizenKong@lemmy.worldEnglish
        27•8 months ago

        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).

              • @rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
                1•8 months ago

                Normies at this point are trained like Pavlov’s dogs to ignore the very possibility to treat these big companies as they should be treated by law.

                They are irrationally afraid that Earth will split in half and become infested by goblins if there’s no Apple, just separate Apple Computer, Apple Mobile, Apple Music, Apple TV, Applesoft - I want to see this - and so on, no Google, just separate Google Search, Google Mobile, Googlesoft - ok, not as funny, - etc, Microsoft is a small company and there are also Microhard and Microcloud …

                Apocalypse didn’t happen when AT&T was broken up. Nokia wasn’t broken up by regulators, but that didn’t lead to an apocalypse too, while still was a bad thing. DEC or Sun going down didn’t cause apocalypse.

        • @CitizenKong@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12•8 months ago

          Even worse, only to appease shareholders that are only after short term gains and might even bet on the company failing.

    • Altima NEOEnglish
      6•8 months ago

      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.