Cartoon Network, a division of Warner Bros. Discovery, has quietly withdrawn half a dozen of its games from sale on Steam and other digital platforms, including Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, OK KO! Let’s play Heroes and Steven Universe: Unleash the Light.
The deletions that can be seen on SteamDB they arrived in one batch today and were first spotted by Wario64 on Blue: :
Adventure Time: Finn and Jake’s Epic Quest and Adventure Time: Magic Man’s Head Games have also been removed. The games have also been reportedly removed from non-PC stores.
No reason for the removal was given, but store page every game now carries the same message, only the title changes: “Attention players, OK KO! Let’s Play Heroes will no longer be available for purchase after December 23, 2024. Thank you for playing, Cartoon Network Games.”
The only exception is Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, which was published by Adult Swim Games, but Adult Swim is a division of Cartoon Network, so the separation seems to be a complete difference without any difference.
The takedowns come just a few months after Warner closed the Cartoon Network websiteredirecting people to the Max website and after removing several games published by Adult Swim earlier this year. One big difference is that advance notice was given in such cases, and the rights to at least some of the games withdrawn from sale were instead returned to owners after protests. In this round of removals, it appears that notice was given as it happened.
Discontinued games have been around for a while and don’t have a particularly large player base, but we quite liked some of them when they were new: We said OK KO! Let’s Play Heroes “looks like a cartoon and plays like a classic arcade game” back in 2017 and made a similar declaration for Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time in 2020, stating that it “looks like a PS2 game, and in a good way.” meaning of the word.” But regardless of their merits, seeing games disappear for no discernible reason is fundamentally irritating, especially when it’s done by a company owned by a division of Warner, which has recently been eminent for tilting movies Batgirl AND Coyote vs. Acme for tax relief.
I have reached out to Cartoon Network for information about being removed from the list and will update if I hear back.
