Duck Game and other Adult Swim Games player counts skyrocket as delisting threats continue

At the request of Warner Bros Discovery, Adult Swim Games developers are seeing delisting warnings arrive in their mailbox. Players are responding fast by buying ASG titles like Duck Game, Soundodger+, and more en masse, even if they haven’t been announced for delisting.

Adult Swim Games has 21 games and four DLCs on the Steam Store—all of which could be affected by the Warner Bros Discovery delisting notices. Starting around March 5 with Owen Deery’s announcement, developers of those games began posting about the delisting warnings to their X (formerly Twitter) accounts, Steam communities, and other public platforms.

Devs like TheRealMattKain reached out to their community with uncertainty, saying “it makes me sick to think that purchased games will presumably be removed from users’ libraries,” and that they will “continue to press Warner Bros. to transfer Fist Puncher back to us.” The dev also mentioned in a forum for the Robot Unicorn DLC that “WB isn’t even answering our emails at this point.”

This isn’t an isolated incident. The solo developer Studio Bean posted on March 7 about their frustrations with the transfer process, with Warner Bros refusing to give ownership back because “it would only be fair to transfer no one’s games since they can’t [transfer] them all.”

But there’s a strange light at the end of the tunnel. In response to the delisting announcements, many small indie titles—and large ones too, in the case of Duck Game—are seeing a player count resurgence. Studio Bean posted with a level of derision, chiding players for showing up “now that it’s leaving.” Fist Puncher is experiencing a similar trend, seeing nearly a 100 percent increase in player count on Steam Charts in the last 30 days.

It’s not just the small games getting attention, either—Duck Game, by far the best seller in Adult Swim Games’ narrowing library, is also getting some love. Developer superjoebob posted an enthusiastic thanks on their X account for all the players swarming to buy the title. But, he also emphasized that Duck Game‘s delisting “isn’t confirmed” and that the dev is “not going to let it kill duck game.”

While it’s nice to see these titles receiving some attention, it’s unfortunate that these small indie games might fade away. Now, the devs are facing an arduous decision: to let their games die or try to pitch them to another publisher—or even self-publish, like Small Radios, Big Television—without any mention of the ASG team that helped them out. Hopefully, the renewed interest in these developers’ projects will help them continue to grow and preserve the small communities sprouting in their wake, even as they’re stripped of their Steam store history.