The controversial PC game Plantation Simulator, which at one point featured Black characters being whipped by players, has been removed from the store after the game’s developer requested that Valve remove it.
On May 24, following a lot of press and viral posts, developer FzzyBzzy posted a final update on the official Plantation Simulator store page. According to the dev, at that point in time, they requested Valve remove the game from Steam as they had “said what needed to be said.” Here’s the full post announcing the plan to delist the game:
Hello friends, lol. We’ve decided to retire this game! We’ve [sic] think we have said what needed to be said. We saw the opportunities and took them. 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!
On May 26, according to SteamDB, Valve did indeed remove Plantation Simulator from Steam. While you can still see the game’s page on Steam, it is no longer for sale. According to the backend data shared on SteamDB, the game was removed at the request of the publisher/developer, seemingly confirming that it was FzzyBzzy’s decision.
Kotaku has contacted Valve multiple times about Plantation Simulator but has not heard back.
Released earlier this month, Plantation Simulator was a basic top-down sim game that had players taking on the role of a Southern plantation owner who used the threat of violence and actual beatings to force Black slaves to grow and harvest crops.
The game featured this content warning at launch: “In this game, you will be whipping black people to keep your farm productive. If you whip your black person too much, they will die.” So yeah, a very awful and terrible game and one which Valve seemingly had no issue with, even after its existence was spread around online.
Then, on May 21, FzzyBzzy updated the game with the 1.2 patch and made the slaves white, which angered a lot of terrible people and made this whole situation even more strange. Now, the game is gone, but there are still a lot of questions about how it was even made available on Steam and why Valve apparently didn’t do anything to remove it.