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.
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.
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.