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The Adult Swim Games delisting situation is strange, even to lawyers
28.03.2024 - 13:37 / polygon.com
Video games get delisted often, mostly for banal reasons like an expired music licensing agreement or a publishing agreement running out. But the recent delisting of Adult Swim Games en masse feels a bit different.
This isn’t a licensing issue, nor is it the case of a live service game no longer making enough money to cover the cost of running it. According to Brandon Huffman, an attorney with Odin Law and Media and volunteer counsel for the International Game Developers’ Association, it’s actually unclear why Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of Adult Swim, would work to delist the games at all.
“So those sorts of situations happen, but for a publisher to delist, sort of systematically, their whole catalog over time — or what seems like is eventually going to happen, to delist their whole catalog over time? That’s not a rights issue at all,” he said in a call with Polygon.
Starting in the beginning of March, a number of independent game developers reported that they had received correspondence from Warner Bros. Discovery saying that their games would be removed from digital storefronts. The first mention of this online came from developer Owen Deery, who posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the company was “retiring” his game Small Radios Big Televisions. He then made the Windows PC version free to download through a self-hosted website. Others have since come forward saying that they received a similar notice from the company.
However, just self-hosting an older game is easier said than done. For one thing, the developers that worked with Adult Swim Games didn’t all have identical agreements. For example, Ray’s the Dead developer Ragtag Studio received significant funding from Adult Swim Games to get its project across the finish line, but this didn’t come with any other strings attached, so Ragtag published the game itself. Huffman, who’s been working with people affected by the situation, said he’s seen a few publishing agreements, but each one had different terms. So it’s possible not every creator will be able to repost their games.
More significantly, giving the developer freedom to post the game on their own on a platform like Steam, while simple logistically, can wipe out years of data. Discussions, reviews, wishlists, and more won’t transfer to a new page. All of this is also key to preserving a game’s history, according to Phil Salvador, library director at Video Game History Foundation.
“Preserving game history is also about more than preserving the game itself. Removing Steam listings also deletes the communities that have existed for these games, in some cases for more than a decade,” he told Polygon in an email.
Then there’s the other disclaimer: Developers have to remove
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