Warner Bros. are returning some Adult Swim-published Steam store pages to their developers after all
Corporate giant had originally planned to delist all games
Warner Bros., owners of the now-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing label, have contacted some developers about returning ownership of their game's Steam pages. The developers of both Small Radios Big Televisions and Duck Game shared the news on X yesterday. It's a seeming reversal of Warner Bros. stated policy back in March, when all Adult Swim Games seemed destined to be delisted.
"Duck Game is safe!!," shared Landon Podbielski on X. "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."
Owen Deery reacted to the news that his game Small Radios Big Television would be removed from sale by making it free to download on March 5th. He shared an update on X yesterday, saying simply that it "will not be 'retired'. Ownership and store listings will return to me."
Super Mega Team, the developers of Rise & Shine, also shared that they'd received the same email from Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. originally told Matt Kain, the developer of Fist Puncher, 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." Studio Bean, the creator of Soundodger+, was told by Warner Bros. that it would "only be fair to transfer no one's games since they can't do them all."
Adult Swim Games was founded in 2005 but was restructured by its parent company in late 2020, effectively rendering the publisher defunct. They published games such as Robot Unicorn Attack, Jazzpunk, Westerado: Double Barreled, Headlander, Kingsway, and dozens of others.
While Adult Swim did not seem to take IP rights to the game's they published, they did control the Steam store pages. Delisting those pages would have wiped away years-worth of Steam reviews, leaving developers to start over from scratch within the marketplace. Transferring ownership of a Steam store page can be performed in just a few clicks.
In instances where developers themselves are defunct, it's likely some games would not return to Steam at all - and that's still a risk. I'll update this post if more developers declare they've been contacted.