1527623595-8e5bf1368c1a8b2e3891f8b1a76a350a8bd0ca56.jpg
Revive Interactive

Bellevue-based gaming company Valve has announced that they will remove a controversial game from their online marketplace Steam. The game, Active Shooter, came under fire (sorry) this week after a Seattle woman started a petition calling for its removal in the wake of ongoing school shootings. The now banned first-person shooter game allowed users to be either a member of S.W.A.T. team or a school shooter themselves.

In a statement, Valve called the developer a "troll":

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.

Stephanie Robinett, the woman who started the petition, says she is relieved that Valve dropped the game from their platform. Still, the company's statement didn't exactly inspire trust. "They said nothing about the actual game content," Robinett says. "I feel like they were trying to please everyone without actually saying that this is wrong and we won't have it on our site."