Warner Bros has revealed they’re shutting down Adult Swim Games, the off-branch of the cable network that specialized in publishing mostly small, quirky indie titles. If you had to guess how they’re doing it, what would you assume? You’d be correct…they’re simply delisting all the games from Steam with no chance of return.
At least they’ve given advance warning this time: the removal of that library is supposed to happen within 60 days, or two months, so if there was any Adult Swim Game that struck your fancy yet you never pulled the trigger on, you still have a chance. The full list of games is at this link.
Mind, WB didn’t formally announce the impending death of ASG. The reason we know about it is because they told the developers of these games, and the developers vented their frustration to social media and to reporters. Owen Deery, creator of Small Radios Big Televisions, was the first to blab, and as an apology for events he can’t control, he is offering his game for free through his website.
It’s unclear what this means legally. In most cases, the contract these devs signed with ASG retained their ownership of the game’s code and characters, but for this specific Steam release, the ball appears to be in WB’s court and WB is simply popping the ball and throwing it in the trash. “When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no,” says the co-creator of Fist Puncher. “The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators.”
So while it’s unlikely these games would disappear forever, they might have to be re-submitted to Steam, and your previous ownership of them wouldn’t count — but WB doesn’t care about any of this.
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