UPDATE: Hatred is back on Steam Greenlight after an intervention from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell.
According to developer Destructive Creations, Newell himself has apologised for removing the controversial game, Hatred, from it’s Steam Greenlight system.
Subsequently, the developer published the following email from Newell on its Facebook page.
“Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight,” said Newell. “Since I wasn’t up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that”.
“It turns out 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.”
Original Story: Valve has refused to publish Hatred on Steam and has pulled the game from its Greenlight system.
Hatred is a rather controversial mass-murder videogame that has attracted attention for its glorification of the murder of innocent victims.
In development at Destructive Creations, Hatred was published on the Steam Greenlight section on December 15, but was subsequently pulled by Valve.
The idea of Greenlight is to let developers share early concepts and ideas for their game with gamers. The players must then vote on the game and if they get enough votes that game has a chance of being sold through Steam.
However, that isn’t going to be the case for Hatred as Valve isn’t very impressed with the game’s violent nature.
“Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight, we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down,” said Valve’s Doug Lombardi to Eurogamer.
Hatred actually puts players in control of a mass murderer with suicidal tendancies who goes about killing innocent people.
Destructive Creations attempted to cause controversy is evidently working.
“After only a couple of hours [of the] Greenlight campaign being live, Hatred gathered 13,148 up votes and ended up being number 7 on a top 100 list,” said Destructive Creations in a statement.
“At the end of the day, you, gamers, will judge if we were able to do a game that’s simply fun to play.”
There’s definitely a flexibility in the definition of fun at Destructive Creations, as we can’t personally see the appeal of such a game.
Destructive Creations still plans to release the game in early 2015.
Read more: Hatred – Is shock value ever enough?
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
