
Steam’s offerings run the gamut of topics and themes, but many of the games that have attracted an outsize share of attention have carried tags like “dark humor” and “satire.” Valve did not immediately respond to questions regarding the fate of those games. “Every game we published was checked and approved beforehand by Valve,” it added in a public post.Īccording to the website, provocative titles began to vanish from the platform at a greater clip late Thursday. “We have received no communication from Valve and thus are unsure of the situation, only that our games have been removed and access to our publishing system was restricted,” the company wrote in a message on Twitter. “Now you’re mad and want to kill all Africans that gave you AIDS to get revenge.”Īrcane Raise, the publisher of AIDS Simulator, said it had been caught off guard by the removal of its entire game catalog from the Steam store. “Welcome to Africa, you’ve got H.I.V.!” read a summary of the game. “So when we say there’s no way to avoid making a bunch of people mad when making decisions in this space, we’re including our own employees, their families and their communities in that.”īy Thursday evening, a page for the game AIDS Simulator, a creation of the same developer and publisher as Suicide Simulator, had been removed from the Steam store. “We don’t all agree on what deserves to be on the store,” the company said. Lombardi said a “large group” was involved in the decision-making process, but couldn’t say exactly how many people that included. Valve, which is based in Bellevue, Wash., and prides itself on being “boss-free since 1996,” arrived at the policy change collectively.

But you’re also going to see something on the store that you believe should be there, and some other people will hate it and want it not to exist.” “Unless you don’t have any opinions, that’s guaranteed to happen. “The Steam store is going to contain something that you hate, and don’t think should exist,” it said. In its statement, the platform framed the new policy as a difficult decision certain to disappoint everyone at one point or another. “It was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence,” he said in an email, noting that the game’s developer, Acid Publishing Group, had also been involved in “numerous misrepresentations, copyright violations and customer abuses.”
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Last week, the game, in which players prowl a school campus from the point of view of an attacker, had its scheduled release canceled by Valve Corporation, the software and technology company that operates Steam.īut far from backing away from controversial games entirely, Steam has now decided to “allow everything” on its platform, it said on Wednesday, carving out disqualifying exceptions only for content it finds to be “illegal, or straight-up trolling.”ĭoug Lombardi, a Valve spokesman, emphasized that Active Shooter would never have made the cut.

It was a role-playing game called Active Shooter, however, that recently inspired broad protest, including condemnation from the parents of victims of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. Others have more innocuous titles that conceal the darker thrust of their game play: In the forthcoming Kindergarten, for instance, cartoon children are shot in the head by the school principal or hacked apart by the janitor.
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Some of the titles recently available from the online video game marketplace Steam have names - like Suicide Simulator - that are fairly self-explanatory.
