Active Shooter: Video game pitched as 'school shooting simulation' axed from online platform Steam

Video game Active Shooter was due to go on sale next month
ACID
Ella Wills30 May 2018

A game pitched as a "school shooting simulation" has been axed from gaming platform Steam ahead of its release.

It sparked outrage among parents of real-life school shooting victims, and more than 190,000 backed an online petition opposing its launch.

The father of a teenager who was killed in the Parkland mass shooting branded the game "despicable".

Steam's owner, Valve Corporation, said it ditched the game because the company behind the game, ACID, is a "troll" with a history of bad behaviour on the platform.

However, the game publisher has denied accusations that it promotes violence.

Active Shooter appeared on the Steam Store, which has over 100 million users, earlier this month, promising to allow players to be either the shooter or SWAT team in a school shooting.

A trailer for the game showed a school shooter moving through corridors with automatic weapons, a knife and grenades.

Valve has since removed the game, which was set for release on June 6.

But the game had already received a great deal of criticism from people on Steam as well as politicians and parents of the Parkland school shooting, in which 17 staff and students were gunned down in February.

Ryan Petty lost his daughter Alaina in the massacre. He wrote on Twitter: "This company should face the wrath of everyone who cares about school and public safety and it should start immediately. Do not buy this game for your kids or any other game made by this company."

Survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, including Emma Gonzalez, have also called for the game to be shut down, while Bill Nelson, a senator for Florida, described the game as "inexcusable".

A statement from Valve to the website Deadline said: "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."

ACID had earlier released a statement on Steam defending the game.

It said: "Since this game's storefront has been live, I have been stormed with accusations and heavy critics from people across the globe.

"First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any sort of a mass shooting. As I said in the description of the game, Active Shooter is essentially a dynamic SWAT simulator in which dynamic roles are offered to players."

The statement also suggested that the school shooter could be removed from the game.

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