Cartoon Network, a division of Warner Bros. Discovery, has quietly removed a half-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 delistings, which as seen on SteamDB came in a single batch earlier today, were first noticed by Wario64 on Bluesky:
Adventure Time: Finn and Jake's Epic Quest, and Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games have also been removed. The games have also reportedly been taken down from non-PC storefronts.
A reason for the removal wasn't provided, but the store page for each game now carries the same message, with only the title changed: "Attention players, OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes will no longer be available for sale after Dec 23rd, 2024. Thanks for playing, Cartoon Network Games."
The one 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 entirely a distinction without a difference.
The takedowns come just a few months after Warner closed the Cartoon Network website, shunting people to its Max website instead, and follow removal of a bunch of Adult Swim-published games earlier this year. One big difference is that advance notice was provided in those cases, and the rights to at least some of the games being removed from sale were instead handed back to their owners after an outcry. In this round of removals, the notification that it was happening seems to have been given as it happened.
The games being removed from sale have been around for a while and don't have especially large player bases, but we quite liked some of them when they were new: We said OK K.O.! Let's Play Heroes "looks like a cartoon and plays like an arcade classic" back in 2017, and made a similar declaration about Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time in 2020, saying it "looks like a PS2 game, in a good way." Regardless of their merits, though, seeing games get disappeared for no discernible reason is irksome as a matter of principle, particularly when the company doing it is a division of Warner, notorious in recent times for vaulting movies Batgirl and Coyote vs Acme in favor of a tax writeoff.
I've reached out to Cartoon Network for information on the delistings and will update if I receive a reply.
