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On March 29, 2022, CNN+, CNN's take on a video streaming service, debuted. On April 28, 2022, it shuttered, making it the fastest shutdown of any launched streaming service. Despite that discouraging superlative, CNN has plans for another subscription-based video streaming platform, Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

Mark Thompson, who took CNN's helm in August 2023, over a year after CNN+'s demise, spoke with FT about evolving the company. The publication reported that Thompson is "working on plans for a digital subscription streaming service." The executive told the publication that a digital subscription, including digital content streaming, is "a serious possibility," adding, "no decisions had been made, but I think it’s quite likely that we’ll end up there."

CNN++, or whatever a new CNN streaming package might be named, would not just be another CNN+, per Thompson.

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Enlarge / A plucky, likable creature under the looming threat of consumption by an interconnected menacing force of nature in one of Adult Swim Games' titles. (credit: Adult Swim Games)

Warner Bros. Discovery seems set to remove at least 16 games from its Adult Swim Games subsidiary from games markets and has told the affected developers that it will not transfer the games back to them nor offer other means of selling them in the future.

Ars reported Wednesday on the plight of Small Radios Big Televisions, a Steam and PlayStation game made by a solo developer who received a notice from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) that it was "retiring" his game within 60 days.

In a comment on that Ars post, Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games' Fist Puncher, noted that they had received the same "retired" notice from WBD. "When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio's Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up "Transferring Applications" in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators," Kain wrote.

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Vývojářské studio Rocksteady Studios prozradilo, že zahájí první sezónu hry Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League 28. března. V rámci první části obsahu po spuštění hry se k Suicide Squad připojí Joker.

Verze Jokera, která se připojí k hratelné sestavě, pochází z alternativní reality, v prostředí DC přezdívané Elseworlds. Tato verze Jokera bude moci používat zbraně jako palcát a deštník poháněný raketou. Joker se také bude moci vznést do vzduchu a provádět vzdušné útoky.

Další obsah, který se objeví ve hře v rámci první sezóny patří dvě nové epizody, které s sebou přinesou nové mise, aktivity a nepřátele, s nimiž bude možné bojovat. K dispozici budou také nové zbraně a vybavení, za které bude možné hrát, a také další obsah týkající se Riddlera.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League je k dispozici na PC, PS5 a Xboxu řady X/S. Hra se při vydání setkala se smíšenými recenzemi a byla označena finančním ředitelem společnosti Warner Bros. Discovery Gunnarem Wiedenfelsem za „nesplňující“ očekávání.

Článek 1. sezóna Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League odstartuje 28. března se nejdříve objevil na GAME PRESS.

Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth.

That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, and a lot of pointless mergers designed specifically to goose stock valuations and provide big fat tax breaks.

The king of said “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation was of course the AT&T–>Warner Brothers–>Discovery series of mergers, which resulted in no limit of brand degradation, layoffs, and absolute chaos in the empty pursuit of unlimited scale (aka “enshittification”). The dumb merger already killed Mad Magazine, HBO, and countless television shows, driving millions of subscribers to the exits.

But Max executives clearly aren’t done with ham-fisted efforts to make stocks go up. This week Max executives decided that they’d make John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight harder to watch by no longer making show clips available on YouTube the next day:

The goal was to apparently drive subscribers to the Max streaming service. But because they’re apparently too cheap to pay residuals and hosting costs, Max also no longer lets users watch old seasons of the show, meaning that only the last two seasons of the show are available. In short: the quest for unrealistic quarterly growth sooner or later creates perverse incentives to cannibalize brand quality.

Again, this is all par for the course for an industry that learned absolutely nothing from the scale-chasing disaster that ultimately was traditional cable TV. They’re going to continue on this path until they see a dramatic subscriber exodus to cheap or free services (whether that’s TikTok and Twitch or, more obviously, piracy), at which point they’ll blame everything but themselves (VPNs! China!) for the self-inflicted wound.