Warner Bros. Discovery Gives In And Transfers Games Back To Developers’ Steam Accounts
from the phew dept
A couple of months back, we talked about an odd decision Warner Bros. Discovery made to simply “retire” a bunch of games it published, mostly from small indie studios, from the various online stores where they were sold, such as Steam. This resulted in anger from those who bought these games and confusion from those who developed them. Buyers were pissed because retired games would either disappear from the accounts of those who bought them, or else would force them to get re-published versions of the games from indie developers that would be without all of the data and achievements players had gotten playing them. The confusion from the developers was over the fact that WBD could simply transfer these games to those developers’ storefront accounts rather than losing anything at all for the customers. On Steam, for instance, comments from some of those same developers demonstrate that this process is trivially easy.
In a comment on that Ars post, Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games’ Fist Puncher, noted that they had received the same “retired” notice from WBD. “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. 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,” Kain wrote.
This led to all kinds of speculation as to why WBD was going down this road. It was an obvious PR nightmare, telling those who bought published products from WBD that some or all of their stuff was just gone. Some speculated that this was being done as some kind of tax write-off strategy. Others suggested it was just that the company didn’t want the headache of figuring out the sales taxes on these titles anymore and just wanted it all to go away.
Either way, thanks to the public pressure and the reporting done on the subject, it appears that WBD has relented and will, in fact, transfer the games to the developer accounts on these storefronts.
Late last week, one of the Adult Swim Games creators impacted by Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) seeming shutdown posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he received an email from Warner Bros. indicating that his Duck Game was “safe.” “[T]he game is being returned to corptron along with [its] store pages on all platforms,” Landon wrote. The same went for Owen Deery, whose notice from WBD about his game Small Radios Big Televisions brought attention to the media conglomerate’s actions and who posted that his game, too, will have its ownership and store listings returned to him.
As noted by PC Gamer, the 60-day timeline originally provided to developers for their games to be delisted has passed, and yet most of the Adult Swim Games titles are still up.
And so, for now, it seems that WBD is going through the transfer process for these games. We don’t have confirmation it is doing so for all the games in question, but it would be sort of insane if the company were picking and choosing which games to transfer and which not to.
But it’s hard for this to make anyone feel like their purchased content is safe, no? If that content lived at the pleasure of WBD’s whims, which, as we just saw, can change on a dime, what prevents the company from making anti-customer decisions with other content in the future?
Filed Under: adult swim games, duck game, indie studios, retired video games, video games
Companies: warner bros. discovery
Comments on “Warner Bros. Discovery Gives In And Transfers Games Back To Developers’ Steam Accounts”
We won’t let our workers retire so they don’t work anymore but we will retire our games so they won’t work anymore
The part where access to the thing you paid for disappears is the worst. i mean, yeah, archive locally, i don’t know why anyone trusts the cloud (not this old man, yelling at it), but to have stuff be revoked for no reason is beyond ridiculous.
Of course, it sucks for the original developers (probably, in many cases), and losing the cloud saves/achievements blah blah is pretty lame too.
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At this point, the best way to save media against copyright’s anti preservation agenda is- monks. If a “Canticle for Leibovitz” taught us anything, they would be the ideal preservationists. Can’t arrest them, because they already live in cells, and they’re used to sacrificing for other people and believing in something greater than themselves. Let’s get some Carthusians and Benedectines on the case and information will be saved.
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Fist.Puncher.ISO.+all.Patches-PC-MONASTARi.torrent
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Wow, can’t say I ever expected to see “A Canticle for Leibovitz” ref, great book I read near 50 years ago.
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If these onerous copyright laws really went full Fahrenheit 451 on anything that even looked like infringement, who would be bold enough, resourceful enough, and mobile enough to save these records of material? Part of me wants to think that the rights afforded to criminals such as the presumption of innocence, plea bargaining, and trial by jury could help- and it would be absolutely ridiculous for the censors to put inanimate objects like books on trial. What makes the difference will be the self-sacrifice of people willing to risk their freedom to save culture.
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Because it has storage redundancy and backups that a typical user does not have the discipline to maintain.
It doesn’t have administerial redundancy. If someone decides something has to go, it goes.
I suspect that is one of the reasons Microsoft acquired GitHub. It is close to impossible to kill something distributed across a bunch of individual repositories, and that is a really important trait of Git.
If everyone lets their Git repository (including clones from others) get maintained by Microsoft, Microsoft regains the power of a kill switch on projects.
While large projects cannot really get all their private off-site repositories killed, separating the project from the tools and accounts and workflows most active developers rely on will still throw a very serious wrench into its workings.
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Not sure why the article says end-users would lose access to the games, as this isn’t how Steam works.
If a game is delisted from Steam then it just means the game/DLC cannot be purchased and community items are no longer marketable, but anyone that has previously purchased the game can still play and download it.
Similarly achievements, cloud saves and steam community features are all retained.
What’s wrong with thinking about orders of monks being the great preservationists of our time? They have everything we need to record documents, hours of prayer and fasting to resist interrogations, a history of self sacrifice to give themselves- but not their message- to the authorities, a former monk starting Protestantism as we know it. Our justice system says “burn books and everything like books”, but the monks and those who inherit their outlook say “We’ll make more copies than you can burn and give them away to those like us”
There’s a lot we can learn from them
Lesson anybody whose content is going to be published through a publisher: make sure the contract addresses what happens when the publisher no longer wishes to publish the content.
That sound you hear is Tero Pulkinnen shaking his fist in anger, now that another avenue from which he had a slightly more than zero chance of shilling Meshpage has been closed off.
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Well, he did say, “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.”
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Personally I’m still waiting to hear his explanation on how the reduced number of legal avenues for entertainment would drive people to his crappy bloatware, but then his brain has been divided into the strict dichotomy of “use Meshpage” or “spray paint rude graffiti on the walls”. So it’s not like we’d ever get a coherent response.
re: hi-tech gadgetry
You were given a Ferrari and your people treated it like a lawnmower.
Because fuck you, pay me.
WBD doing their best to be the shittiest company of the decade.
I’m not following the logic here. If the games were sold on Steam, it’d be Valve that was responsible for the collecting the sales taxes and delivering them to the relevant authorities.