A business decision that diminishes even more my perception of Valve.

Zombies are nothing like humans because zombies are already dead humans. You are just killing walking bags of rotting flesh. And when you kill zombies, you are defending yourself. Because they will attack you on sight. So you have the moral high ground.

Come on, vast majority of zombie game establish very early on that either zombies are animated corpses or are infected people who have already died. Context, man, context - if Hatered was filled with zombies, it would not be controversial, and no zombie survival horror game that I know of have ever raised a controversy over shooting zombies, regardless of what your personal thoughts on the matter are (and no, you disliking something is not a controversy, it's just you disliking something)

Valve was always this bad but up until now, only the German speaking part of the world knew this... But now, the whole world can see.

Well,it's your right to think so. But every manager has the duty to turn away serious damage or harm from his/her company. I can imagine that there are big publishers (eg. Disney) that don't their products sold side by side with a game like Hatred and these publishers are important business partners for Steam/Valve.

So you can call it censorship or support of censorship as much as you like, it's still not. It has nothing to do with ethics or morale, it's all about the money.

And I'm sure that a store like GOG will not sell this game as well. They are in an even more complicated situation. They sell worldwide and they don't do regional locks. If this game ever sees the day of light (which I also doubt), it will get banned in several countries. Selling it here could bring GOG into serious legal trouble, so I don't see them doing it.

If Zombies are monsters, they are the most human form of the monster bestiary. So why are they so popular? Isn't because they are so similar to "normal" human being?

If Zombies are infected, so are they pandemic victims, but in almost every zombie games, you are not defending yourself to build a survivor community or trying to prevent the pandemic to spread more but the searched entertainment is to kill mass zombies, just like a beat'hem all.

Sure, I dislike Zombies games, but I could also name many games I like though. Lots of strategy games, 4X and so on. When in any RTS game, someone kills peasants, even though those peasants are collecting ressources, they are civilians. When in a 4X or a grand strategy game, someone plunders cities, it's civilian mass murders. Or in Europa Universalis when colonists slay natives. Or in Crusader Kings, when a nobleman makes a killing attempt to a cousin, his own wife, his sons, etc. And even many soldiers leaded to Pyrric victories.

The actual problem is to kill virtual "innocent" human beings.

And in so many RPGs, when we slay so many innocent animals, so what does the PETA?

Killing virtual innocent beings is part of most entertainment we know, why should we only react when something is showing in a TPP or a FPP what so many games do with statistics or light subterfuge like green blood or "already dead people"?

It might be all about the money but so what?

Being decent human beings and forging a decent world to live in, means not only thinking about money. Money is not everything. And I call it censorship because it is censorship. And that is a fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship Censorship can equal business for those who don't give a shit about censorship but don't tell me there is no censorship happening when there is...

And if Hatred gets banned in several countries, then I'd understand if GOG didn't sell Hatred to people in those countries. Of course, I don't expect GOG to become a bunch of outlaws fighting against censorship... But giving into a bunch of whining SJWs is not acceptable in my eyes.


OFF TOPIC
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I wish people would stop saying the word "business" like business justifies everything. Yeah, it only justifies everything if you are a gangster or a similar kind of person with no morals who just wants to watch the world burn while you swim in a pool of cash.

Depends on the country, I guess. In Germany zombies always made little difference for the rating people. Carmageddon 1 got banned despite a censored version with zombies instead of people. Left 4 Dead received heavy censorship, both in-game and on the box art. The Resident Evil games had their mercenaries modes removed because of their focus on killing... zombies. And Dead Island simply didn't get released there despite a German publisher.

Hilariously enough all of the Serious Sam games were released uncut there and The Second Encounter got a USK rating of 12. :P

I believe, they are popular because it's very exciting and scary to be up against an enemy that outnumbers you like that.

First of all, no, Zombie games are just a terrible example. For one, it's deeply rooted in the zombie lore and culture that you are not killing living people, and besides, there's very few games where killing zombies is the centrepiece of the game - usually you're supposed to fulfill and objective or get somewhere, while killing zombies needlessly just costs you time and ammunition. And, of course, there's the whole thing of them trying to constantly kill you, which your general civilian won't do, so there's always argument of self-preservation.

As for the other games, yes, they allow for murder of unarmed innocents. Then again, that's not the central theme of the those games, and often enough, there's punishment for doing so.

And I have to reiterate, what you dislike is not a controversy.

Yeah, I remember them rejecting Seduce Me awhile back. I don't know how explicit that was, though. The reviews on Amazon (who sells the game) are almost universally negative, so I suppose it's possible that its sub-par quality had something to do with it, but some of the terrible games that have made it on Steam suggest otherwise. The Steam page for that Fairy Tale game I mentioned earlier doesn't have any Wayback Machine entries prior to 2014, so it's likely that it was added this year. Not through Greenlight, but still, ten minutes of playing the game would be enough to see that the game crashes after the very first puzzle.

"We don't care if our games actually work, so long as they're not controversial" is such a weird stance for Steam to take, especially when it concerns the Greenlight, users-choose-what-ends-up-on-the-store system.

Seduce Me is genuinely shoddy and overpriced, but maybe it could make its way here as an older game in a bit. I'd love to play that.

Greeting from the unicorn, you should train you reading comprehension skills.

Valve/Steam is neither a "governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions" (other groups and institutions refers to stuff like churches). They are a private company and they can sell or not sell whatever they want without it being censorship.
And yes for a private company within a capitalistic society, it is all about he money (and the market share). Isn't that what US Americans always tell us?

I believe that what doesn't make those games controversial today, is the fact the points I rose are only parts of the games and I agree with you both.

I previously said that I disliked Zombies games, in fact I only don't play them, I don't hate them. Sure, when I talked about green blood, I was refering to the first House of the Dead which had its red blood censored turned to green.

In strategy games, I often use those tactics or strategies, sometimes in a roleplay sense, sometimes because I feel the game forces the player to use them; not using them often makes the game really much harder. I agree, sometimes those tactics have a further punishment, but sometimes it's the contrary.

I am thinking of another partial censorship, when I searched about the Uncharted Waters series, I found a story telling that the original Uncharted Waters 3 (on japanese Windows PC) had slavery. But a further patch removed it.

High Seas Trader didn't have slavery, but the developers themselves made a note about their choice in the end ot the manual. Although it made the game less roleplay because of choices of that era (even if the player wouldn't be forced tu use it), I respect their choice and the fact they clearly speaked about it.

In Europa Universalis 2, I usually don't use it but I understand that it's here and can be used. When I played an english long campaign, I often slay natives to stabilize my colonies though.

All in all, the thing that annoys me is the fact we clearly make a difference between controversial parts of a game and an overall controversial game because the later has poor other gameplay. I could understand that Hatred could be removed from greenlight because it doesn't add much beyond its controversial core. Because it lacks of everything else. But I don't understand that other games with some kind of similar controversial things only stay on store because they have other things, and the excuse to remove Hatred being "it's controversial". Saying "it's a poor game" would make me alright.