Screenshot of Hatred. Image via Destructive Creations
A game that incites the player to commit ‘genocide’ has been re-instated on the Steam gaming platform after Valve, which runs the platform, took it down for being too graphic.
Despite violent games being a regular occurrence in the industry, and hundreds of games existing on the Steam platform that could be considered ultra-violent, Hatred had appeared to pass the point of decency with Valve as it proved to be one of the few games to have been taken down from its Greenlight service which offers indie developers the chance to sell their game on the gaming e-commerce platform.
What perhaps differs Hatred from other violent video games is the premise that you play a heavily-armed disgruntled person whose sole intention is to commit mass murder among the local populace of a suburban town.
Games that are ‘greenlit’ are published to the main store of Valve, only after they receive significant interest from the public who up-vote games in the Greenlight section which, following its pulling from Steam, promoted the game ten-fold through online discussion.
Following its re-instatement, the game reached the top of the Greenlight charts with 87pc of the public’s vote recommending it to be given the go-ahead.
The image posted to the Destructive Creations page following its re-instatement to Greenlight. Image via Destructive Creations
In their ‘cheery’ Steam Greenlight page, the developers of the game, Destructive Creations, say of the player’s mission, “You will go out for a hunt, you will clear the American soil off [sic] humans with cold blood. You will shoot, you will hurt, you will kill, you will die. There are no rules, no compassion, no mercy, no point of going back. You are the lord of life and death now and you have the full control over lifes [sic] of worthless human scum.”
Only hours after it was released on Monday, the developers received an email from Valve, which said, “We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.”
However, yesterday, after much debate online it appears that Valve have relented following an email posted by the developers, reporting to be from the head of Valve, Gabe Newell, apologising for taking it down.
“Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight. Since I wasn’t up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that. It turns out that it wasn’t a good decision, and we’ll be putting Hatred back up. My apologies to you and your team. Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers. Good luck with your game,” said the email.
Following its re-introduction to Steam, the developers say it will be released in Q2 2015.
