Warner Bros. Discovery is telling developers it plans to start “retiring” games published by its Adult Swim Games label, game makers who worked with the publisher tell Polygon. At least three games are under threat of being removed from Steam and other digital stores, with the fate of other games published by Adult Swim unclear.
The media conglomerate’s planned removal of those games echoes cuts from its film and television business; Warner Bros. Discovery infamously scrapped plans to release nearly complete movies Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, and removed multiple series from its streaming services. If Warner Bros. does go through with plans to delist Adult Swim’s games from Steam and digital console stores, 18 or more games could be affected.
News of the Warner Bros. plan to potentially pull Adult Swim’s games from Steam and the PlayStation Store was first reported by developer Owen Reedy, who released puzzle-adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions through the label in 2016. Reedy said on X Tuesday the game was being “retired” by Adult Swim Games’ owner. He responded to the company’s decision by making the Windows PC version of Small Radios Big Televisions available to download for free from his studio’s website.
Since everything is going digital, it seems the only way to actually control the things you want is to pirate them.
Physical media is the only way to ensure you retain access to it.
(Aside from the other issues) A DVD may not even retain it for 15 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#Longevity
Hardly something to bet on for continued availability.
Just a side note that M-DISC exists which is essentially a blue ray disk with a claimed longevity of a thousand years (strong emphasis on "claimed". there's a lot of controversy around it)
but yes the only way to retain access is piracy as it allows people that didn't have the media to get it
It's weird to me that apparently nobody backs up their pirated stuff and just assumes they'll able to torrent it again in 10 years.
I get it about stuff that you don't really care about But if I spend a day looking for a specific movie, I'm taking it to my grave
Thanks for reminding me I need to try mdisc. I have multiple redundant backups but don't trust any of them for long term. (Hard drive, SSD flash, USB flash)
My carefully burned DVDs are going bad after 15 years just like you said. (They were checked for pio errors at time of burn using only verbatim azzo 100 year media and stored in my basement in black dvd cases.)
I really need to test them as well. Being ~100GB each is quite good for me, I won't need more than 100 for my whole life
I have some laserdiscs that are ~40 years old and still play fine.