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.
IIRC Steam lets people who purchased (or rather add to their library) a game access to it indefinitely. A famous example was second party side-scrolling half-life game named Codename Gordon. It’s delisted but still available with the right steam command. I personally also have a source mod on steam on my account where it had been delisted due to potential lawsuit but I can still play it if I wanted.
That has definitely been the case with at least some games in the past that publishers removed. I am not aware of any cases where a game that someone purchased stops being available.
That being said, I kind of suspect that if it’s not possible to buy it any more, an existing player probably isn’t going to be getting much by way of any fixes at that point, but that’s gonna be the case for any game at some point.