Removing Hatred from Steam Greenlight aroused strong emotions among both gamers and journalists bringing to the table some important questions about creative freedom, equal treatment for different games and developers and the rules that run gaming industry. What happened next though is something that will re-define the industry for years to come.
Steam Greenlight campaign for Hatred was shut down after only 11 hours since launch, even though the game was then no #7 among all Steam Greenlight games with over 23,000 up votes. Destructive Creations team received a rather laconic information from Valve about the reasons behind the game removal but accepted it for what it was and thought that pretty much ends the whole story.
Until today when Gabe Newell himself e-mailed Destructive Creations Creative Director Jarosław Zieliński appologizing for the whole thing and bringing back the game to public voting on Steam Greenlight.
You can read Gabe’s e-mail below:
Hi, Jaroslaw.
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.
Good luck with your game.
Gabe
In reply to Gabe’s message Jarosław Zieliński, Destructive Creations Creative Director said:
We’re extremelly happy to be back on Steam Greenlight! It’s hard to find proper words to describe what we all feel right now. It’s simply an amazing thing to get such a great news from Gabe Newell himself! THANKS A LOT GABE!
Well what an interesting turn of events. Feel free to head over to Steam if you want to check out the game.