As more developers confirm, it looks likely that ALL Adult Swim Games titles will be removed by May [UPDATE: Better Links]
delistedgames.com
[UPDATE 03/09/24] I had some time this morning to gather the links for the list of games. Also, a reader pointed out that Westerado isn’t self-published so it’s still at risk of a delis…

I don’t understand how this works. How does delisting a game make or save money? It’s already spent in the creation. Now sales don’t cost anything. There’s no goods to ship. Steam copies the files to you, WB doesn’t do anything.

“As more developers confirm, it looks likely that ALL Adult Swim Games titles will be removed by May” cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/26167118

This. Sucks. I really love games like Duck Game, Kingsway, and Super House of Dead Ninjas.

  • dustyData@lemmy.world
    112·
    8 months ago

    Taxes. When you have products sold you have to pay taxes on their commercialization and on the revenue they produce. By removing all sort of properties, from games to movies and series from distribution, WBD can write them off and thus reduce the tax amount they have to pay on them. This is just Warner addressing an internal liquidity and budget issue. They’ve been using this strategy for a year now because they were, according to them, short of cash. By removing old properties that are no longer selling well, they reduce the tax burden for more recent and profitable products. This of course sucks for users and consumers who can no longer access them on streaming or buy old games. But it effectively reduced their operating costs.

    • lemmyman@lemmy.world
      8·
      8 months ago

      I see “taxes” a lot but I have never seen someone explain the mechanism by which this is supposed to work.

      The only thing I can come up with in my head is that they have capitalized the development costs and are currently depreciating the resulting asset. And that by cancelling/delisting the games it may allow them to immediately depreciate the rest of it, thereby recognizing a large expense for the current tax year, reducing profit, and therefore taxes.

      Is that how this is supposed to work?

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
        7·
        8 months ago

        Pretty much. The delist is presented as a big operating “loss” to tax authorities. An asset that they will no longer have and will no longer make them revenue. The only thing they are retaining is the copyright. This was their 2022 strategy.

        But it is also about cost vs. revenue in the mid term. If it cost X amount to keep a property in a streaming service (servers, programmers, bandwidth, etc.) But it brings in less than X in revenue, that revenue still has to pay a lot of passives (residuals, licensing, fees) and taxes. Then that property is a net loss for the company and other products have to pick up the slack to pay the full X costs. By delisting the whole company runs a financially healthier profit. They over spent and the most recent merger was left holding the bag of debts.