The situation of delisting Adult Swim Games is strange, even for lawyers

Video games are often removed, usually for trivial reasons such as an expired music licensing agreement or a publishing deal that is expiring. But the recent removal of the Adult Swim Games en masse feels a little different.

This isn’t a licensing issue, nor is it if a live service game no longer makes enough money to cover its operating costs. According to Brandon Huffman, an attorney at Odin Law and Media and a volunteer advisor for the International Game Developers’ Association, it’s actually unclear why Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of Adult Swim, would even try to remove the games from the market.

“So those kinds of situations happen, but if a publisher more or less systematically delists its entire catalog over time — or, what seems like it’s going to eventually happen, delists its entire catalog over time to delete? That is not a rights issue at all,” he said in a conversation with Polygon.

In early March, a number of independent game developers reported receiving correspondence from Warner Bros. Discovery stating that their games would be removed from digital stores. The first mention of this online came from developer Owen Deery, who posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the company was “retiring” its game Small radios, large televisions. He then created the Windows PC version free to download via a self-hosted website. Others have since come forward saying they received a similar notice from the company.

However, hosting an older game yourself is easier said than done. For starters, the developers working with Adult Swim Games didn’t all have the same similarities. For example, Ray is the Dead developer Ragtag Studio received significant funding from Adult Swim Games to get his project across the finish line, but there were no strings attached, so Ragtag published the game himself. Huffman, who has worked with people affected by the situation, said he has seen a few publishing deals, but each deal had different terms. So not every creator may be able to repost their games.

More importantly, giving the developer the freedom to put the game on a platform like Steam themselves, while logistically simple, could wipe out years of data. Discussions, reviews, wishlists and more will not be transferred to a new page. All of this is also key to preserving a game’s history, said Phil Salvador, library director at the Video Game History Foundation.

“Preserving gaming history is also about more than preserving the game itself. Removing Steam listings also removes the communities that have existed for these games, in some cases for over a decade,” he told Polygon in an email.

Then there’s the other disclaimer: developers should remove any mention of Adult Swim from the game itself. And, as Salvador noted, what happens “when the developers no longer have their source code”? Many of these games are over a decade old and haven’t received updates in years.

Michael Molinari, who released the 2013 songs Soundodger+ via Adult Swim Games, Polygon said in early March that it was told to “remove all mentions of Adult Swim Games” – including the names of people who were on the Adult Swim team and were listed in the credits, which was also a huge problem for the preservation of games. “I’m a big believer in game preservation, and this is a direct blow to properly crediting the people who worked on a game,” he said.

It is possible to transfer ownership of a Steam page, but that requires all parties, including Valve Software, to be involved in the conversation. It is theoretically easy to do – just a few clicks using Steam’s transfer page – but you have Warner Bros. Discovery to transfer the page, or, according to Huffman, you have to prove to Valve that you own it and have someone there transfer the page (“which they are not obligated to do,” Huffman added).

Image: Team2Bit/Swimming Games for Adults

Unfortunately, it was difficult to find out WHO to even contact Warner Bros. Discovery. Adult Swim as a whole is in a precarious spot compared to its peak from the mid-2000s, and the games division notably went through layoffs and restructuring when the entire WarnerMedia brand was owned by AT&T. In 2020, Big Pixel Studios, developer of Pocket Morties and the first acquisition of Adult Swim Games, was shut down as part of those efforts. And because, according to a number of sources, Adult Swim Games is working with a skeleton crew (the official website still mentions 2020’s Samurai Jack: battle through time as “coming soon”), it’s hard to find someone to talk to.

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

The lingering question, however, is: why? Why bother deleting the games at all? There are no administrative costs associated with listing a game on a platform like Steam, minus the fact that you have to pay Valve a percentage of sales. If these games have been around so long that they don’t make much money anymore, then it would be Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t cost much at all to maintain them.

“The chances of a publisher pulling a game from search results are very slim because once you pull the game from search results, you no longer make any money from it,” says Huffman. “And so, if a game is canceled, it should theoretically make so little money that the burden of writing the check to the developer is too much administrative cost, or there’s something bigger going on.”

Not every affected developer has yet announced that their game will be delisted, but it is expected that these announcements will come in. Warner Bros. Discovery has yet to fully reveal its strategy for future games beyond statements about the distribution 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 in the coming months.

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