Adult Swim games maybe permanently off of Valve’s Steam online platform. According to reports from Delisted Games, member of Team2Bit, the development team for Fist Puncher broke the news on Wednesday via its Steam Community page.
According to the developer Matt Kain, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) allegedly issued a noticed that Fist Puncher would be delisted from Steam in 60 days due to “internal changes.”
When asked if Warner Bros could keep access to the game open via transferring it to the team’s publisher account Warner Bros said no citing that they didn’t have the resources to do so. Kain noted that transferring a game shouldn’t be out of WBD’s range and that the process took as little as three minuets.
Unsurprisingly, the possibility of losing the game’s Steam page and the 10 years worth of community discussion on it is disheartening to Kain and the rest of his team.
“This is incredibly disappointing. I’m not entirely sure what will even happen if the game gets delisted, but it makes me sick to think that purchased games will presumably be removed from users’ libraries,” wrote Kain.
“Our community and our players have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which could all be lost. We have Kickstarter backers who helped fund Fist Puncher (even some who have cameo appearances in the game) who will eventually no longer be able to play it,” he continued.
WBD had also made moves to pull another Adult Swim Game, Small Radios Big Televisions, from Steam and PlayStation stores. The game’s sole developer, Owen Deery, made the game free to download in response.
In an interview with Game Developer, Deery was disappointed but not very surprised at WBD’s decision.
“When you’re working with purely digital products nothing is going to stay around for very long,” said Deery. “It’s kind of depressing, I’m very proud of the game, but I can see why they did it.”
Warner Bros. Discovery has been in a constant state of change, initially ramping up at the begining of 2023 with the cancellation of massive projects like the now defunct film Batgirl. Considering the major hits WBD took due to the failure of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, it’s unsurprising that the company would go this route especially when one considers that Adult Swim Games’s last published work was in 2020.
That said, Kain will continue to protest WBD’s decision for the sake of game preservation. As more developers affiliated with WBD find themselves in similar positions, the effort to get their games back into their hands is growing. How much it will work is still up in the air.