22
votes
Duck Game rights are returned to developer
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- Title
- Landon ٩( ᐛ )و on Twitter: "duck game is safe!! more details soon but the email from warner finally came. the game is being returned to corptron along with it's store pages on all platforms, it's not going anywhere. thank you everyone... hoping everyone else got the same email. / Twitter"
- Authors
- Landon ٩( ᐛ )و
Context? Even the author’s Twitter page has none.
Adult Swim Games has been caught up in Warner Bros. Discovery’s slash and burn divestment tactics, and have planned to delist all of their Steam Games they have published in May. That situation has seem to have changed, as the dev to Duck Game got confirmation that the game is staying on Steam.
At least one other Adult Swim Games game was able to get the rights back to the devs.
See this tweet from the dev of Small Radios Big Televisions.
I've yet to see an explanation of how delisting these games will save WBD any amount of money, leaving me to believe they are literally doing it out of malice.
Delisting them means that WBD would need to pay absolutely no attention to them going forward. No one on staff would need to remember they exist. It's possible they've already lost the internal staff who knew how to handle the system and they don't want to hire someone to handle a task they don't care about. There's plenty of options that boil down to corrosive neglect rather than malice.
Normally I think the idea is that they don't want to support sales of the game anymore, since that might require paid employee or contractor time to deal with the various issues that might arise. Things like bug reports, community management (moderation), copyright and trademark issues, content reports, expectation management, expiring licenses, etc. Not to mention they might feel like these games are competing with the launch of more modern games? Especially when modern games are for the most part not going to be quite as fun to play with friends as Duck Game!
A tl;dr would be: WB Discovery owns Adult Swim Games, and they decided to delist all the games published by them, but also not transfer the store pages back to the developers.
Is there any (preferably sourced or backed by evidence) reason why it’s better to unlist a game versus simply cutting any further development? The unlisting thing is what baffles me as there are lots of games (ignoring ones that use licensed music/assets) that can stay up with a simple disclaimer that it’s sold “as is” and without further developer support.
I’m assuming it’s like what u/MimicSquid or u/Protected said, but I cannot personally find evidence (beyond what is assumed to be the case) of that occurring here. It feels like there’s some other “write off a failed investment” thing possibly going on with this, but that’s my own conspiracy imagination thinking that WB is somehow able to claim lost R&D costs or something similar. This may be my own fault of thinking that corporations are doing 4D chess instead of taking the most straightforward or simple way out.
Thing is, I think most of the Adult Swim games weren't in active development or live service. As far as I know most of them were "done" and didn't need active maintenance. And even then, I think it would fall onto the developers rather than WB.
It's why the decision to delist the games has been so baffling to everyone. As far as I can tell, it was basically free money.
Click on the
adult swim gamestag and some previous posts will add a little context.