The team at Valve seem to have unceremoniously delisted the upcoming mass shooting simulator Active Shooter from Steam today, calling the developer “a troll, with a history.”
This is a big deal because the alleged game developer in question (Revived Games, aka Ata Berdiyev) seems to have a storied history of making terrible games, often by reusing the assets and intellectual property of others, and then quickly having them removed from Steam.
It’s also significant given that the alleged video game in question purports to put players in the shoes of either a mass shooter or the law enforcement personnel attempting to stop them, and thus quickly earned the public ire of mass shooting survivors, the parents of victims/survivors, politicians, and basically anyone with a conscience.
“We have removed the developer Revived Games and publisher ACID from Steam,” a Valve representative told Motherboard. “This developer and publisher is, in fact, a person calling himself Ata Berdiyev, who had previously been removed last fall when he was operating as ‘[bc]Interactive’ and ‘Elusive Team.'”
Sure enough, the Steam listing for Active Shooter (which was supposed to launch next month) now appears to be nonexistent.
“Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation,” the rep continued. “His subsequent return under new business names was a fact that came to light as we investigated the controversy around his upcoming title. We are not going to do business with people who act like this towards our customers or Valve. The broader conversation about Steam’s content policies is one that we’ll be addressing soon.”
It’s worth pointing out that earlier this month Valve’s content policies were publicly called into question after developers began reporting threats of removal from Steam over games the company deemed to include inappropriate adult content.