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Valve Has Removed a School Shooting Simulator From Steam, Calling the Developer a 'Troll'

Valve said the maker of 'Active Shooter' is "a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation.”

On June 6, developer Revived Games and publisher ACID were going to unleash the video game Active Shooter on the world. The game would let player experience a mass shooting from the point of the shooter or the SWAT team trying to take them down. Some people were understandably upset.

But the game won’t see the light of day, at least not on Steam. Valve—the company behind the digital distribution storefront—has removed it.

“We have removed the developer Revived Games and publisher ACID from Steam,” Valve told me via email. “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.’”

Valve previously kicked Berdiyev off of Steam when he released a game called Piccled Ricc, based on the episode of Rick and Morty where Rick turns into a pickle and fights off rats. Berdiyev used pre-bought assets from Unity—an engine people use to build video games—and dumped some simple Pickle Rick models into it. Berdiyev had been in trouble for that for allegedly uploading games such as Fidget Spinner Simulator that were low effort asset flips.

A year old Reddit threat detailed the misadventures of Berdiyev. Revived Games other games, all of which are now removed from Steam, include cash-in games such as Zucc Simulator, Tyde Pod Challenge, and White Power: Pure Voltage.

“Ata is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation,” Valve told me. “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.”