According to the site Delisted Games, Adult Swim Games, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery, is ceasing operations and telling developers it’ll be “retiring” the titles the label has published.
Delisted Games cites multiple game developers who’ve been told their games will be delisted “within 60 days.” One such studio is Team2Bit, the developer behind Fist Puncher, released in 2013.
In an update on Fist Puncher’s Steam discussions, Matt Kain, a developer on the game, says, “We’ve asked that Warner Bros. simply transfer the game to our Steam publisher account so that it can stay active, but so far they have said no with the reason being that they made the universal decision not to transfer the games back to the original studios and do not have the resources to do so.”
While there hasn’t been an official confirmation, Delisted Games speculates that the delisting could affect all games published under Adult Swim.
There are over 20 Adult Swim-published games on Steam, including the likes of Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, Oblitus, and more. You can see the full list here.
Earlier this week, a developer on Small Radios Big Televisions, another Adult Swim-published game, said the news of the delisting was “depressing.”
“The email wasn’t so much a discussion about retiring the game, it was a legal notice,” Owen Deery, a developer at Fire Face, told Gamedeveloper.com “In terms of how it has affected me: it’s kind of depressing, I’m very proud of the game, but I can see why they did it. Adult Swim Games hasn’t really been a thing for many years now, and everyone I worked with at the publisher has long since moved on to other places. When you’re working with purely digital products, nothing is going to stay around for very long.”
This is the latest in a long line of choices Warner Bros. Discovery has made to either pull or erase media off of various platforms. The company has made the controversial choice not to release films like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme. In December 2023, Warner Bros. also pulled over 1000 seasons of TV from PlayStation user’s libraries.
