this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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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.

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[–] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 334 points 8 months ago (8 children)

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.

[–] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 56 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 115 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But digitizing does have some benefits, like bit-for-bit archival, usually by a "third party"

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[–] Catsrules@lemmy.ml 95 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 83 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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 🤦

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 46 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (9 children)

Weve lost far more pre-digital copies of games than we have digital.

Physical media breaks and degrades, once they stop selling it in a store and your copy doesnt work anymore its gone forever.

Like you’re just so utterly wrong it’s mind boggling to see your comment upvoted by so many.

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[–] Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] mudle@lemmy.ml 214 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 149 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 63 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 140 points 8 months ago (11 children)

They don't realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 56 points 8 months ago

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.”

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[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 108 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world 34 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 98 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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

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[–] ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world 94 points 8 months ago

Piracy has been legitimized by corporate lies about the free market.

[–] OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 87 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk 40 points 8 months ago (3 children)

if you write it off as a tax write off you get to lie about "expected viewership" rather than actual viewership

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[–] kuraitengai@programming.dev 35 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] Guntrigger@feddit.ch 84 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 29 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] FreakinSteve@lemmy.world 70 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Zazlov: Gets $223M annual salary

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[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 62 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de 62 points 8 months ago (22 children)

Since everything is going digital, it seems the only way to actually control the things you want is to pirate them.

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[–] Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 56 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yet another reason piracy is right and just

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 50 points 8 months ago (1 children)

it makes sense that failing business would want to remove digital assets hosted somewhere else that can't possibly lose them money

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[–] PhAzE@lemmy.ca 49 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 49 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 47 points 8 months ago
[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 36 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] N00dle@lemmy.world 36 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] electricprism@lemmy.ml 33 points 8 months ago

They Want To Erase History.

They are Burning The Books.

[–] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 32 points 8 months ago

...and of course Duck Game never got released on GoG

Fuck this greedy bullshit

[–] nieceandtows@lemmy.world 29 points 8 months ago

Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation

[–] Maoo@hexbear.net 28 points 8 months ago (16 children)

Finally someone is standing up to the woke mob. Thank you, WB conglomerate! You are the true underdog.

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[–] adhdplantdev@lemm.ee 27 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Tax codes and capitalism at it finest. Companies gonna company

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