Russian-Made “Active Shooter” Game Gets Canceled

The New York Times reports:

The online game unfolds from the point of view of an attacker, aiming a weapon down a school corridor or throwing a grenade into an auditorium. The character creeps around corners and up staircases. Bullets spray, blood spatters. SWAT team members are shot dead. Civilians are splayed out on the floor.

Active Shooter was developed by Acid Publishing Group, which has an online page in English and Russian. The developer was planning to sell the game on Steam, a publishing marketplace run by Valve Corporation of Bellevue, Wash.

But on Tuesday evening, after facing online calls for a boycott, Valve said in a statement that it would not carry any games by Acid, the company behind Active Shooter, and that it had removed other games that Acid had published on the Steam platform.

Valve claims that the game’s maker “is a troll, with a history of customer abuse, publishing copyrighted material, and user review manipulation.”