Active Shooter, a game where you can play as a school shooter, has been pulled from Steam
A game where you can roam the halls of a school with an assault rifle has been removed from Steam, but not for the reason you might expect.
Valve has been heavily criticised recently for how it curates Steam, the leading PC digital distribution platform for video games. The company has been accused of double standards after cracking down on anime dating games while games such as Active Shooter exist unchallenged.
Active Shooter arrived in the aftermath of a recent mass shooting in a Texan school. As the Huffington Post pointed out earlier this year, Steam is a gathering point for self-identifying Nazis and would-be school shooters, so quite why Active Shooter was approved in the first place is anyone’s guess.
After a recent investigation of Active Shooter, however, Valve finally took action and removed it, along with every other game its creator had published on Steam. It wasn’t removed because of its content, however.
A Valve representative told Kotaku that Active Shooter’s creator, Ata Berdiyev, is a “troll” with "a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation. We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve," the spokesperson said.
This statement suggests the game wasn’t removed because of its content, but rather because of the actions of the developer previously.