Hatred, aka. Everyone Please Pay Attention To Me, I'm So Edgy And Controversial: The Game, was removed from Steam Greenlight earlier this week. "Based on what we've seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam," Valve's Doug Lombardi said at the time.
Now, it's back on Steam Greenlight. According to the game's developers, Gabe Newell contacted them to say the following:
"Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight. Since I wasn't up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that. It turns out that it wasn't a good decision, and we'll be putting Hatred back up. My apologies to you and your team. Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers."
Hatred, for those not aware, is a faux-isometric shooter about murdering civilians. It's the game you'd make if you were an anti-social, angsty teenager desperate to prove to the world that you were truly nihilistic, rather than alone in a bedroom lined with ejaculate-encrusted T-shirts. That it's being made by adults suggests that it's a cynical attempt to generate controversy and pander to an audience railing against a perceived moralistic shift in the nature of game criticism and development.
While it will no doubt generate moral hand-wringing from the type of places that trade in that sort of thing, such worries seem beside the point. It's a grim-dark version of Postal 1, which itself is on Steam. After it came out, nobody cared about Postal. It was tediously mediocre. Take a line picked from the Hatred trailer: "I just fucking hate this world, and the human worms feasting on its carcass." Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sixth-Form Goth Poetry Simulator 2015.
Back to Valve's statements, you'll notice that they're not contradictory. Hatred is back on Steam Greenlight. Whether it makes it to Steam proper remains to be seen. I suspect it'll ultimately come down to standard retailer policies—ultimately based on Hatred's content and age rating.
