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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 the issue is about having DRM, not whether it’s sold on physical media or not. Digital games don’t necessarily need to have DRM either.
How’s this for digital rights management: Warner Bros is erasing games from online retailers entirely. Which they cannot do with physical media.
You must have forgotten where you even were.
And if you have the game downloaded, you still have the files. Just as much as you have a disk.
On the other hand, disks stop being produced far sooner than digital games stop being sold/hosted.
If you download the game through a client or other proprietary software then in all likelyhood it does not function without that client. Meaning you don’t have the game. You have a fragment of the game.