Valve Pulls School Shooting Simulator from Steam, Calls Developer a 'Troll'

[Shawn Zipay]

Valve has called the developer of Active Shooter a "troll with a history of customer abuse." Active Shooter was slated to release on June 6 from developer Revived Games publisher ACID. It was a game that would allow players to experience a mass shooting from either the point of view of the shooter or the point of view of the SWAT team that was tasked with taking them down.

As you may have already guessed, some people were rightfully pissed off about this.

Thankfully Valve stepped in and have decided to pull the game from Steam. In addition, they have also removed Revived Games and ACID from Steam. I would like to believe that this would have happened regardless of the public outcry, but we can't say for sure.

In an email sent out to Vice, a Valve representative issued the following statement.

"We have removed the developer Revived Games and publisher ACID from Steam. "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.'"

"Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation. 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."

For some additional background here, Valve had previously removed Berdiyev from Steam after he released a game called Piccled Ricc, an obvious ripoff of a Rick and Morty episode where Rick turns into a pickle and fights off rats. Berdiyev simply flipped some Unity assets that were purchased and sold the game on Steam as an original work. Berdiyev also released another asset flip called Fidget Spinner Simulator, which simply had the player walking around a broken, barren landscape and, you guessed it, spinning a fidget spinner on their finger. This was really just the tip of the ice berg, as this Reddit thread pointed out a year ago.

Under the "Revived Games" moniker, Berdiyev released such hits on Steam like Zucc Simulator, Tyde Pod Challenge, and White Power: Pure Voltage. It's great that Valve has now said that they will soon address Steam's content policies, but they should have never let it get to this point.