Update, Tuesday evening May 29: Valve removes controversial school shooting game and denounces developer as ‘troll with history of customer abuse’
More than 150,000 people have signed a petition asking Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software not to allow a new game on its Steam platform that simulates school shootings and has sparked outrage across the nation.
Active Shooter, a first-person shooter game by Russian developer Acid, lets players step into the shoes of SWAT team members or the shooters themselves, with another option coming to control civilians. The game is set to debut June 6 on Steam at a cost of around $5 to $10.
The game has struck a chord as the nation continues to deal with school shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla. where 17 people were killed and one earlier this month in Santa Fe, Texas where 10 students and staff died. Survivors and parents of students killed in the Parkland shooting have spoken out.
Valve Corp shut down this shovelware immediately please https://t.co/rjCfBTHfIr
— Emma González (@Emma4Change) May 29, 2018
This company should face the wrath of everyone who cares about school and public safety and it should start immediately. Do not buy this game for your kids or any other game made by this company.https://t.co/LbkXy0upwc
— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) May 27, 2018
So too have politicians.
This is inexcusable. Any company that develops a game like this in wake of such a horrific tragedy should be ashamed of itself. https://t.co/jjp6LxNWhC
— Senator Bill Nelson (@SenBillNelson) May 28, 2018
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment on the issue and will update this post if we hear back.
As controversy over the game began to rise, the developer wrote a note on Steam saying “it has written to Valve and will likely remove the shooters role in this game by the release.” The developer wrote that the original plan for the game was to focus strictly on a SWAT simulator, and the decision to add the shooter and civilian roles was done to add more depth of play.
Valve’s Steam platform has become one of the biggest outlets for game publishers, with a reported 7,672 games released there in 2017 alone. Each game has its own storefront, and Valve reviews and approves those storefronts before developers can sell their games.
Update, Tuesday evening May 29: Valve removes controversial school shooting game and denounces developer as ‘troll with history of customer abuse’
