Meanwhile, Valve remains quite inconsistent with what it will and will not allow on their platform. A game where you are only tasked with killing innocent civilians? Apparently fine. Smuggling illegal aliens across the border? Not fine as shown with Steam only selling "Snuggle" Truck on their platform and not its original release and title, Smuggle Truck. AO rated games? Nope. Explicit versions of visual novel games? Not on Steam. A game called Seduce Me was pulled from Greenlight back in 2012. It was a game that was pulled because it contained offensive material, as you may have already guessed.

Valve's official Steam Greenlight guidelines notes the following rule for what can be added to the service:

Needless to say, Valve has been woefully inconsistent with the enforcement of their own policies. Illegal immigrants in a game? Sex? Nope, not on Valve's watch. A game where who has a singular purpose of having you kill innocent civilians? Apparently less offensive than sex or immigrants. That's not even mentioning the developer's ties with Neo-Nazi organizations and white supremacy groups. Apparently those aren't offensive enough either.

Valve is an independent company and obviously free to do what they want. I won't deny them that fact, but they need to start getting some sort of cohesion going on. They cannot have double and triple standards like this given their position in digital distribution.

Here's a game i'm always interested to hear peoples views on, i really love this series and it was only really the first game which garnered some bad reactions for its content, Payday.
Technically a very offensive game, killing nothing but hundreds of cops, sometimes accidently civilians, stealing money and drugs... i guess because the money is the objective it's ok.

I think the main difference here (of which there are actually many) between Payday and something like Hatred is that the core focus of Payday is to rob a place to get money. The main focus of something like Hatred is to literally kill innocent civilians. Anything else is secondary.

Many/most of the missions in the Payday games can be stealthed without ever having to fire a round. Yes, if that goes south, you do have to protect yourself from the police onslaught in the game but that isn't the main focus of the game. You also mentioned civilians in Payday. Yep, you can kill civilians in the game but it comes at a cost: You lose a fairly substantial amount of money for every civilian you kill. Not only that but you actually speed up and exacerbate the police assault against you. Keeping civilians alive is actually preferred because they slow the police assaults and they can be traded in to get a dead/captured player back into the game.

I played a game of Payday 2 where some dudes idea of stealth was to grenade spam the map killing all civilians.... he probably didn't get paid very much... but it totally worked, lol.

Yeah, I was confused by this as well. I figured it made sense them removing it because of the rule and some of the other games removed in the past, but then it wasnt.

I wonder if it is because of other games like Payday and Grand Theft Auto where innocent people get killed. No, its not the focus, but it is part of the game.

Its just very confusing and just a matter of time before something happens and media outlets point to it and they then take it down.