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So this is just a thing now? Removing media from the world?
They found out it works so now it's gonna become a trend.
That was always the point of digitizing the world. It's crazy to me that people didn't see it coming, but it's nice that people are actually taking notice now.
But digitizing does have some benefits, like bit-for-bit archival, usually by a "third party"
I disagree, digitizing is what is saving a lot of the media. You can save hundreds of thousands of hours of videos and many games in a single 20TB drive today. You couldn't do that without digital technology.
In fact, the lack of digital storage is why, to name an infamous example, the only recordings of most episodes of the original Doctor Who show are from the private collections of viewers: the BBC, lacking both funding and storage space, were forced to record new content over episodes with no backup.
I hate it when luddites pine for the days of my childhood and early adulthood where the storage, transfer, and use of every single type of media was so damn impractical compared to now.
It's like wanting to go back to horses and walking being the only forms of land transportation because some trains are loud 🤦
Weve lost far more pre-digital copies of games than we have digital.
Physical media breaks and degrades, once they stop selling it in a store and your copy doesnt work anymore its gone forever.
Like you’re just so utterly wrong it’s mind boggling to see your comment upvoted by so many.
Time, and time again, they prove how piracy is literally THE only option when it comes to preserving media.
Products no longer available to buy should fall into public domain.
WB are an absolute cancer. Suicide Squad fails spectacularly due to being a multiplayer live service game that nobody asked for, and their immediate response is to go all in on multiplayer live service games.
Because heaven forbid the executives could be fucking wrong.
If I can’t buy it, I will pirate it with zero moral issues.
I own over 1000 DVDs and a couple hundred BluRays, but will pirate anything that gets removed from streaming or isn’t available in my region for some shitty licensing reasons.
They don't realize by doing stuff like this they are pushing people back to piracy.
In the wise words of Gaben: "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.”
I've never encountered a better argument for piracy and drm-free content than abandonware
There should be a law in the United States - if you stop selling it, 1 year later you lose your copyright and it becomes public domain.
If you can remove content from the marketplace for a tax write off, the removed content should become public property.
That actually makes a ton of sense. We fucking paid for it after all.
... why? They're complete products that just sit there and make money for almost no effort
From what we have seen from Zaslav, I wouldn't be surprised if they're going to claim another creative tax write-off for the non-depreciated value of the assets.
WarnerBrosDiscovery is in massive debt (40 billion) to AT&T, which is itself in even more debt (138 billion). They are trying to make as much money liquid as quickly as they can to pay off the debt, long term profitability be damned. I wouldn't be surprised if WBD is bought by an ever bigger player in a few years (Apple, Sony, Disney or Microsoft).
Cool, then they won't have any problems with everybody downloading them for free.
If they want to cry about lost revenue, then they can turn around and sue themselves for making the games unavailable
Piracy has been legitimized by corporate lies about the free market.
I honestly don't understand the math of not releasing movies and un-releasing games. People say tax purposes but I'd think streaming is essentially pure profit, hard to imagine not being able to make 20% of your money back or whatever credit you get for taxes.
if you write it off as a tax write off you get to lie about "expected viewership" rather than actual viewership
Think of it like Russian nesting dolls.
You got the production company that pays $100 million to make a movie. The production company is owned by a studio. Production company licenses the movie to the studio that owns it for $200 million. But it’s all the same ownership and no money changed hands. It’s just on paper. So now the $100 million movie cost $200 million. Then the studio licenses out the movie to the marketing company, which the studio also owns, for $300 million. Again no money changed hands and the value is all on paper.
Do that a couple more times and that’s how a movie that literally cost $100 million and made $500 million at the box office “barely broke even”.
Might be off on the layers, but I heard that description of movie accounting years ago.
This practice feels like something that should be illegal. Effectively it is destroying art that hundreds or thousands of people worked hard to make, for the sake of fiddling the books of the owning company that commissioned it.
If you "write it off" to be worth zero, it should either become freely available abandonware, or can be claimed as the intellectual property of those that worked on it. Otherwise it is evident that there is some value to be had and therefore tax fraud to claim it has none.
I agree with you. If a company writes off something in order to make it with zero, then that thing should immediately fall into the public domain.
Since everything is going digital, it seems the only way to actually control the things you want is to pirate them.
Luckily Steam will keep Duck Game in my library, but I dread the moment Valve leadership changes. Steam has existed for 20 years, and I naively hope I'll still be able to play my games in 40 years on my Steck Deck.
it makes sense that failing business would want to remove digital assets hosted somewhere else that can't possibly lose them money
I'm waiting for the day when actors and game devs refuse to work on things owned by WB because the risk of wasting their time and efforts is too damn high.
FUUUUUUCK DAVID ZASLAV!
He is not only hiding things people enjoy watching and playing, he is hiding history.
Imagine how much less we would know about Elizabethan England if all of Shakespeare's plays were lost to all time.
My hatred of WB goes back to when the purposely released a completely broken Arkham Knight game on PC. It has only grown more recently, I really wanted to watch that Acme vs Coyote movie. I hope to see a leak one day maybe.
I kind of get retiring video IPs to save on residual payments, but games which are pay per download should always be revenue neutral at best. This just reeks of shitty culture war rebranding.
They Want To Erase History.
They are Burning The Books.
...and of course Duck Game never got released on GoG
Fuck this greedy bullshit
Disney should sue WB for their Thanos imitation
Finally someone is standing up to the woke mob. Thank you, WB conglomerate! You are the true underdog.
