UPDATE: Void Interactive has addressed the game’s takedown, saying it was removed after Steam issued the request following a “suggested trademark infringement” in the Night Club map. The statement adds that the game will return once the changes have been made.
The Steam page for tactical shooter Ready Or Not has been removed, several days after it added a level depicting a mass shooting at a nightclub – on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
As of yesterday (June 16), the Steam page for Ready Or Not is unavailable, and trying to access the page via google redirects users to the Steam storefront’s homepage.
Trying to access news articles posted by the Ready Or Not from the UK provides the following message: “An error was encountered while processing your request: This item is currently unavailable in your region”.
Last night, Void Interactive confirmed that “Ready Or Not is temporarily MIA from the Steam store page,” and shared that it is “looking into this with Steam and will have an update for our players very soon”.
Attention Officers!
As you may have noticed, Ready or Not is temporarily MIA from the Steam Store Page.
We're looking into this with Steam and will have an update for our players very soon!
— VOID Interactive (@VOIDInteractive) June 16, 2022
On a Steam community page for Ready Or Not, Void Interactive developer Kaminsky stated “there is an issue with somewhere with Steam’s backend and it’s resulted in the game being taken off the store for some reason, but Ready Or Not is still on the platform”.
“An update will be posted […] when the store page is back up,” added Kaminsky.
It’s unclear whether Ready Or Not has been deliberately de-platformed by Steam, or if it is just an error on Valve‘s part. However, the removal comes several days after the Supporter edition of Ready Or Not was updated to include a new map set in a nightclub called Prysm.
Prysm takes place in the aftermath of a terrorist attack at a nightclub, and depicts the scene of a mass shooting, with piles of bodies strewn across the map. The level bears some resemblance to the 2015 Bataclan shooting in Paris, as well as the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub. Questionably, the map was added on June 12 – the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
While no connection has been confirmed, Valve has removed games depicting similar scenes in the past – in 2018, Valve de-platformed a game called Active Shooter after complaints from campaigns from parents of school shooting victims.
NME has reached out to Void Interactive and Valve for comment.
In other news, Activision Blizzard’s own investigation has found “no widespread harassment” at the company, despite a year of high-profile allegations and at least 37 related departures.