Our PGM group has followed Anstream Arcade with varying levels of interest. We’ve seen it go from free, to paid subscription model and earlier this year perhaps the biggest move: landing on Xbox. But today 11/10/2023 at 12:39pm PST on Twitter, Antstream Arcade, has posted news that their time with the Warner Bros. license is coming to an end. In a long, tweet on Twitter/X they share details of their fondness for the Warner Bros. licenses on their platform and indicating the end is … near, but not any specific date when the license will go away (Ed. See updates at bottom of post, there has been more clarity on this).
In the follow-up discussion on Twitter, they indicate there are 27 Warner Bros. games that will be going away. A search for “Warner” on Antstream indicates these 27 games as likely candidates to go missing from the service at some point in the near (?) future:
Oh man, these are some signature games to lose, Mortal Kombat, Robotron, Rampage, Sinistar … ouch, is all that can be said for this list. Antstream does indicate they are adding additional licenses, but one could argue not of the same popularity of some of the games shown above. Here’s what they say specifically:
We have some great upcoming titles including Truxton, Snow Bros, Jim Power in Mutant Planet, the all time classic, Pong, Rival Turf, Bang!, Burglar X and Super Turrican Score Attack Version. More excitingly, an exclusive unreleased original SNES game, Mr Tuff and the incredible, highly rated indie game for megadrive, Demons of Asteborg and many, many more.
What’s more, we’ve worked really hard to secure our Namco collection for Xbox and we look forward to announcing their release very soon – watch this space!
Will continue to update this post as further information is made available up to and including when this will happen. What do you think of this annoucnement from Antstream? Will you be renewing your subscription? If you have the lifetime subscription, how do you feel about Antstream losing the Warner Bros. license on their service?
UPDATE 11/10/2023 @ 4:40pm PST: the official Anstream Arcade discord has setup a subchannel called #Warner-brothers for dicussion in/around this topic. Just screengrabbed this which is targeting Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav’s Q32003 call with investors. Draw your own conclusions, this speculation is coming from the Discord members there, not the official Anstream, but Zaslav’s words are curious, pointing to future focus for WB on live service games:
UPDATE 11/11/2023 @ 11:25am PST: This was pointed out to me in an earlier stream today by PGM Member and Twitch moderator Vader4633 when we talked about this, but in the Antstream YouTube video, Mike Rouse from Antstream clearly says around the 60 second mark, “Warner Brothers will be leaving us in just a few days time.”
“Just a few days” … this is happening very, very soon it seems.
UPDATE 11/15/2023 @ 8:11pm PST: The 27 Warner Brothers licensed games are now gone from Antstream Arcade. They literally were gone in less than a week, as was mentioned in the video.
This is sad news. Why is it not being talked about more.
Still no news outlets are covering … almost 2 days since Antstream tweeted about it …which is more than surprising. Next week, should be hearing about it from others … maybe, possibly, lol