Overview
Hatred is an upcoming third-person shooter PC video game in development by Polish studio Destructive Creations and scheduled for release in 2015. Due to the highly controversial premise of the game, in which the protagonist embarks on a “genocide crusade”[1] to murder innocent civilians and law enforcement officers, Hatred immediately became a hot topic of controversy within online gaming communities upon its Greenlight reception on Valve’s Steam in December 2014.
Background
On October 16th, 2014 Destructive Creations announced its first title Hatred by releasing a teaser trailer on YouTube. The premiere of the trailer, which features in-game screenshots and footage of the protagonist picking weapons and killing people in grimdark settings, was characterized as “controversial” by multiple video game bloggers.[2][3]
Gameplay
In the game, the player assumes the role of a villain protagonist who begins a massive genocide mission to “cleanse” the society by killing innocent civilians, as well as law enforcement and military personnel. According to the developers’ description, Hatred was conceived as a reactionary experiment to the current zeitgeist in the video gaming industry that focuses on vivid colors and political correctness.
Notable Developments
Epic Games’ Statement
On October 16th, 2014, Epic Games, the creators of Unreal Engine, issued a statement requesting Destructive Creations to remove its logo from the trailer and other promotional materials for the title.
“Epic Games isn’t involved in this project. Unreal Engine 4 is available to the general public for use ‘for any lawful purpose,’ and we explicitly don’t exert any sort of creative control or censorship over projects. However, the video is using the trademarked Unreal Engine 4 logo without permission from Epic, and we’ve asked for the removal of our logo from all marketing associated with this product.”
Steam Greenlight
On December 15th, Hatred was submitted to Steam Greenlight, where it quickly began climbing up the charts to the top ten list, but later that same day, a Valve employee confirmed that the title wouldn’t be approved for release in an e-mail to the video game news site Polygon.
“Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. […] As such we’ll be taking it down.”
Shortly afterwards, Hatred was removed from Steam Greenlight, due to its violent content. In response, Destructive Creations released a statement to address the removal of the title.
Dear Hatred Fans,
As you know today we’ve launched our Steam Greenlight campaign for Hatred. Unfortunately after couple of hours Steam shut it down giving the below as reasons behind their decision:
“We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.”
Even though games like Manhunt or Postal are still available on Steam we of course fully respect Valve’s decision, as they have the right to do so. In the same time we want to assure you that this won’t in any way impact the game’s development, game’s vision or gameplay features we’re aiming for. The game is still to be released in Q2 2015 as planned.
Moreover we don’t treat this as a failure because yet again this showed us a huge community support we’re totally overwhelmed with. After only a couple of hours Greenlight campaign being live, Hatred gathered 13,148 up votes and ended up on a #7 on Top 100 list.
This is the best proof for us that there are diehard Hatred fans out there, waiting for this game to be released. And that we need to keep going to deliver them a game that offers exciting and challenging gameplay.
The whole situation only pushes us forward to go against any adversity and not to give up. It also makes us want to provide our fans Hatred pre-orders sooner, as many of you have asked for them.
At the end of the day you, gamers will judge if we were able to do a game that’s simply fun to play.
Destructive Creations Team
Reinstatement on Steam Greenlight
But on the following day, Hatred was reinstated on the service with a personal apology from Gabe Newell]
“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.”