Warner Bros. delisting games on Steam doesn’t make sense, say lawyers

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 any mention of Adult Swim from the game itself. And, as Salvador noted, what happens “if the developers no longer have their source code”? Many of these games are more than a decade old and haven’t received updates in years.

Michael Molinari, who released 2013’s Soundodger+ through Adult Swim Games, told Polygon in early March that he was told to “remove any and all mention of Adult Swim Games” — including the names of people who were with the Adult Swim team and were listed in the credits, which is another huge problem for game preservation. “I’m a huge supporter of games preservation, and this is a direct blow to properly crediting the people that worked on a game,” he said.

It’s possible to transfer ownership of a Steam page, but that requires all parties, including Valve Software, to be in on the conversation. It’s theoretically easy to do — just a few clicks with the help of Steam’s transfer page — but you need either Warner Bros. Discovery to transfer it over or, according to Huffman, you need to prove to Valve that you’re the owner and have somebody over there transfer the page (“which they have no obligation to do,” Huffman added).

Image: Team2Bit/Adult Swim Games

Unfortunately, it’s been tough to figure out who to even contact at Warner Bros. Discovery. Adult Swim as a whole is in a precarious place compared to its height starting in the mid-2000s, and the games division specifically went through layoffs and restructuring back when the entire WarnerMedia brand was owned by AT&T. In 2020, Big Pixel Studios, developer of Pocket Mortys and Adult Swim Games’ first acquisition, was shut down as part of those efforts. And because Adult Swim Games is working off a skeleton crew according to a couple sources (the official website still lists 2020’s Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time as “coming soon”), it’s difficult to find anybody to talk to.

“I’ve talked to a couple developers who don’t know who their contact person to get the rights back would be, because it’s such a big company,” Huffman said. “And so navigating at this point, If I want out of this, how do I get out of it? Who do I call? That in and of itself is not clear to them.”

The lingering question, though, is: Why? Why bother delisting the games at all? There are no administrative fees involved with listing a game on a platform like Steam, minus having to pay Valve a percentage of sales. If these games have been around so long that they’re not making much money anymore, then it wouldn’t cost Warner Bros. Discovery much at all to keep them up.

“The likelihood that a publisher delists a game is very low because as soon as you delist the game, you stop making money off of it,” Huffman said. “And so, if a game is being delisted, it must be, in theory, making so little money that the burden of writing the check to the developer is too much administrative cost, or something bigger is going on.”

Not every impacted developer has announced their game will be delisted yet, but the expectation is that those notices will come in. Warner Bros. Discovery has yet to fully announce its future games strategy beyond statements regarding the proliferation of popular IP like Harry Potter, but the future of indies at the studio — and for Adult Swim Games as a whole — will become clearer over the coming months.

“This is not the first time that developers have been screwed by publishers, and it won’t be the last time,” Huffman said.