Back in October the world found out about a game called Hatred. While most games released these days feature protagonists killing enemies, it’s always with a purpose behind it. Hatred‘s gameplay is purely centered around killing as many people as possible for the sake of killing. A title like this unsurprisingly caused a lot of controversy (we covered it on both of our Throwdown and Co-Op podcasts) and many questioned whether this game should even be released.
Today, we learned that Valve has decided to pull the game from Steam. Hatred was originally a Steam Greenlight game and since Valve runs Steam, they had to power to pull it from their online store. In an e-mail sent to Polygon, Doug Lombardi from Valve said: “Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.” Epic, the creators of the Unreal Engine which Hatred runs on decided to distance itself from the title, going so far as asking Destructive Creations to remove all Unreal Engine logos from the game’s trailer.
After Hatred was pulled, Destructive Creations had this to say to fans of the game:
Dear Hatred Fans,
As you know today we’ve launched our Steam Greenlight campaign for Hatred. Unfortunately after couple of hours Steam shut it down giving the below as reasons behind their decision:
“We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.”
Even though games like Manhunt or Postal are still available on Steam we of course fully respect Valve’s decision, as they have the right to do so. In the same time we want to assure you that this won’t in any way impact the game’s development, game’s vision or gameplay features we’re aiming for. The game is still to be released in Q2 2015 as planned.
Moreover we don’t treat this as a failure because yet again this showed us a huge community support we’re totally overwhelmed with. After only a couple of hours Greenlight campaign being live, Hatred gathered 13,148 up votes and ended up on a #7 on Top 100 list.
This is the best proof for us that there are diehard Hatred fans out there, waiting for this game to be released. And that we need to keep going to deliver them a game that offers exciting and challenging gameplay.
The whole situation only pushes us forward to go against any adversity and not to give up. It also makes us want to provide our fans Hatred pre-orders sooner, as many of you have asked for them.
At the end of the day you, gamers will judge if we were able to do a game that’s simply fun to play.
Destructive Creations Team
We can’t really be surprised by this outcome. We live in a more sensitive time now where video games are getting more scrutiny than ever. A company can’t release a game like this without some serious blow back from the gaming media and some gamers. We should also keep in mind that this isn’t complete censorship of the game as Hatred will still be released, only not on Steam.
Source: Polygon
