Gamers, eager to see removal as politically-charged, have rallied to support its developers

Hatred, a serial-killer simulator game, was pulled from the most popular online games store yesterday.

Steam pulled the game from its ‘Greenlight’ section last night, which allows users to vote for games that should be sold on its main store. It had been put on the site only a day earlier.

The game allows its player to control a mass-killing villain while they commit a ‘genocidal crusade’, killing innocent civilians and police officers.

The game’s trailer, contains extremely graphic content and shows the central character gathering weapons before going on a killing spree.

The game’s developers have said that the game was a reaction to a lot of games heading “to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment”.

On the game’s website, the developers write: “We say ‘yes, it is a game about killing people’ and the only reason of the antagonist doing that sick stuff is his deep-rooted hatred. Player has to ask himself what can push any human being to mass-murder.”

Steam removed the game last night. “We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam,” said Steam. “As such we’ll be taking it down.”

While the game’s developers said that they respected the decision, they said that the decision would not affect the development of the game and that they would still aim to launch it in the second quarter of 2015.

The game is created by previously unknown developer Destructive Creations. After the release of the trailer some in the gaming community accused the company of being linked with Polish neo-nazi groups, but Jaroslaw Zielinski, the company’s chief executive, has dismissed the claims.

The game has instead been listed on GOG.com — a similar, smaller, marketplace. And gamers supporting the game are sending others to that site to vote for it become available there, as part of what they say is a fight against censorship.

“Censorship is bad,” says one commenter on the site, jimbobrosso. “Give us what we want not what they think we need.”

But gaming blog Kotaku said that the game’s developers had intentionally spun the pulling of the game into an issue of free speech and political correctness, so that the game would not be judged on its own merits.

“Hatred will be judged in just about every other conceivable category before people scrutinize whether it's ‘simply fun to play,’ and its creators know it,” wrote Nathan Grayson. “They're banking on it.”

(Independent.co.uk)

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