On May 12, a developer going by FzzyBzzy released the wildly racist slavery simulation game Plantation Simulator onto Steam.

It’s a top-down sim game in which you play as a Southern plantation owner forcing a number of Black slaves to grow crops under threat of being beaten. That’s it. That was the game.

For the first week or so this game was live, it mostly flew under the radar. No reviews, no players really, according to SteamDB. But around May 20-21, it started picking up.

Reviews began to trickle in, the vast majority of them positive, containing racist commentary, and largely written by people who had played for less than half an hour. For context, the game’s concurrent player peak was 109 individuals last night.

Posted later in the day yesterday, the 1.2 update changed the Black slave characters in the game to white people. A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, put bikinis on the slave characters, and updated the mature content description to, “In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.”

We’ve reached out to Valve for comment twice now about Plantation Simulator and haven’t heard back, and the game remains on the Steam store at the time this piece was published.

  • Davel23@fedia.io
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    19 days ago

    On May 24th the dev posted:

    Hello friends, lol >:3 We’ve decided to retire this game!

    We’ve think we have said what needed to be said. We saw the opportunities and took them :3

    We are reaching out to steam to take this game off the store page!! We do not know when they’ll be able to address the request, but we hope it is soon!

    -Fzzy Bzzy

    And I’m not sure when it happened, but the game is no longer available for purchase. Not sure what more people think Steam should do.

    • cannedtuna@lemmy.worldOP
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      19 days ago

      This wasn’t in the article, so good to know!

      Still, the game shouldn’t have been approved to begin with and should have been pulled immediately after going up.

      The lack of oversight on a game that blatantly violated the Steam TOS is concerning. The game shouldn’t have been allowed to go up on the store and collect money for 2 weeks before being pulled to begin with.

      I do like Valve, and I get they employ less than 500 people (which is wild), but they do need to tighten up oversight. It’s not just this one game like this, there’s been others. See links on same article