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.
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).
Does my nose deceive me, or am I catching a whiff of yet another monopoly?
Quintopoly right now, Quadopoly if WBD gets acquired. Probably a Triopoly or Duopoly fairly soon after that.
But we have antitrust laws and everything!
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.
Making money by destroying/burying digital media. What a backwards world we live in…
Even worse, only to appease shareholders that are only after short term gains and might even bet on the company failing.