School Shooting game “Active Shooter” has been removed from Steam

Over the past few days, Steam has been mired in controversy thanks to the release of a game called “active shooter” on the platform. This game received a lot of press from the mainstream media thanks to the game’s setting, a school shooting simulation.  

The unreleased game allowed players to take the role of an “Elite S.W.A.T member” or “the actual shooter”. The shooter’s aim within the game is to commit mass murder while the S.W.A.T team member tries to stop him. 

While this has sparked an interesting discussion regarding violence in video games, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II’s “No Russian” mission acting as a prime example, the consensus amongst gamers is that Active Shooter has no place on Steam. Valve has since removed Active Shooter from their Steam platform, but not because of public criticisms of the game.   

During an internal investigation into Active Shooter, Valve uncovered that the developer and publisher for the title were already banned from the platform, previously working under the name names [bc]Interactive and Elusive Team. In a statement to Kotaku, a Valve representative went so far as to call the developer a “troll” who had “a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation.”

Regarding the removal of Active Shooter from Steam, Valve stated that “We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve”. This means that the ban is not due to the controversy, the content of the game, or due to the low quality of the product in question, it is because of the developer’s existing ban from the platform.

Valve has stated that “The broader conversation about Steam’s content policies is one that we’ll be addressing soon,” suggesting that Valve’ content policies will soon be reworked to prevent games like Active Shooter from releasing on Steam in the future.