To address this briefly-
Not everything has the same explanation. I wish people would try and understand this simply concept. Or, put more simply, a company can do X, Y, and Z, and you can dislike X, Y, and Z ... but they may have completely different reasons for doing X, Y, and Z ... and they don't all fall under the rubric of, "Because they're evil and hate you."
I mean, it might be the case, but still...
Now, if you ever read my previous regularly updated power rankings on the streaming wars (now discontinued due to lack of interest), you'd know that I dislike Zaslav and believe that the Discovery/Warner merger has largely been disastrous for many reasons. That said, you can't just put all of their actions in a single bucket. Here's a quick breakdown-
A. Not releasing completed movies (Batgirl, etc.). This was purely for tax reasons. As part of the post-merger restructuring, they wrote off almost $2 billion. Why Batgirl in particular? This also went to a pivot in strategy- Batgirl was originally going to be a streaming-only movie. But now, they are concentrating on movies with theatrical releases prior to streaming. They determined that Batgirl was not going to make money theatrically to recoup the expenditure, so instead wrote it off. In addition, to get the tax benefit, they can't show it to the public.
B. Removing shows and movies from streaming. This was both for tax reasons (see, e.g., American Pickle), but also due to contracts and residuals. Some shows (in their determination) cost them more to keep on the streaming platform than it was worth to them.
Understanding why they were making these decisions is simple-go to the incentives. There are three main factors at play-
1. Wall Street suddenly reversed course and demanded profitability from the streamers, not acquisition of new subscribers, which impacted stock prices and has impacted all of the companies with a major streaming component.
2. The new company has a massive debt burden, and has been working to reduce that debt burden.
3. And, of course, Zaslav changed his compensation scheme so that he was no longer rewarded by share price, but by free cash. I mean .... c'mon!
Viewed in this light, everything they are doing has made sense. It is why, for example, Max is licensing the "crown jewels" (major movies like Dune and HBO series) to other streamers, like Netflix. Because MONEY. And it's why they are cutting back on other things-like unprofitable legacy gaming.
In short, it does suck. But as we have learned repeatedly (and as everyone should know) .... there are no rights to streaming from the consumer. Yes, it is wonderful that we get these vast libraries of content that are available, but you really shouldn't depend on any particular thing being available. If you read through the linked article, you will see that they are allowing the games' creators to continue publishing on their own. Now, maybe this will resolve in other ways, and that would be great. But given that the "journalism-like" substance tries to claim that the process would take two minutes at the most ... which confuses and understates the technical process for the internal legal review that would have to occur ... I doubt that there is any real attempt to understand what is going on.
