Worst People Imaginable Freak Out Over Racist Plantation Game As Valve Watches From The Sidelines
7d 22h ago by lemmy.world/u/cannedtuna in gaming from kotaku.com
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.
lmao
It seems like it was a bait and switch to troll racists. They slowly turned the game into a weird romance thing through updates.
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.” Since that update, the user reviews have entirely flip-flopped
Oh 100% sounds like it was. What’s wild is that Valve allowed it to go up like that for a couple weeks, and then allowed the bait and switch to happen and still said nothing.
In my opinion it should have been pulled the second it went up.
The bait and switch, while hilarious, should from Valve’s end should warrant an optional refund window I think (but you know, fuck them racists). That’s just from the perspective of if another game did a bait and switch (a legit one) you’d want the same.
It never should have gotten beyond the approval stage to have been on Steam at all, IMO.
Definitely not, and very concerning that it did
There's not really an approval process. It's not a curated store.
Unless people report a game, Valve doesn't monitor what happens with it
There is an approval process, but it's very much about matching the game you are selling to the claims about it on the store page. It's not really about content beyond that.
This is exactly the problem with most big sites. Valve has just been relatively lucky so far but I expect it wont last forever.
The best part is the play cycle sounds like it hasn't changed, so why do they not like it now?
If I bought a game and it suddenly became racist with an update, I'd want a refund.
These people just have backwards moral systems.
But it is a perfect highlight that what they like is the racism, not the gameplay.
Exactly. That makes it all the more damning.
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.
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
Still, the game shouldn’t have been approved to begin with
There is no approval or curation process on Steam
It's great that Steam didnt interfere, instead allowing the racists to get trolled.
You might disagree if you think that corporations should censor politically sensitive topics to save people from being upset by non-conforming opinions.
Except that Steam had no way of knowing that this was a troll. This could have been a legitimate racist ass game and it still would have stood and made money all the same because as of this moment nothing is there to say otherwise
Fighting racism is education and science. Silencing racism was a failure that allowed the cancer to grow undetected.
No, not properly punishing the racism and then rebuilding is what allowed the cancer to spread.
The idea that anti-racism won in 1865 and then was too merciful,, has something to it.
In the 1960s, the racist regime lost ideological ground to King and Dylan. The regime pushed back with violence. Progressive leaders (incl the brothers Kennedy) were assassinated one after another. After this successful power grab, the regime covered its tracks. By removing modern (post ww2) history from school curriculums. And by claiming that racism was solved. Then they kept a low profile, invented dog whistles, but they didnt give up. Reagan managed to falsely imprison (put to slave labour in private prisons) a significant portion of the black population, and he did it without explicitly talking about racism.
Now the mask is off. Which is energizing Americans to fight back.
Best answer I can give to that forum question: They accepted a few decades without wage increases, and now through a network of SNAP, private health insurance, and political blame idly going to racism, they maneuvered themselves back to being the slaves.
Is this the most legendary bait and switch ever? Or a scared chud? You decide.
The creator, FzzyBzzy, who bills themselves on Twitter/X now as “Creator of the worst games known to humanity :3”, seems gleeful about all of this. In their announcement of the second update last night, they wrote, “Hi gamers! We’ve listened, and we heard YOU! We’ve fixed ALL the issues you’ve been wanting! We’ve added hearts and little kisses for your friends as you become the best new age plantation owner ever! Good Luck! And Keep Gaming!!! UwU.” Their tone on X is similar, up to and including a troll post just a few hours ago in which they “announce” their studio is closing and that they are laying off 200 employees.
Sounds like a legendary troll
I'd have to look at the rest of their stuff before really deciding. I mean, all in all, they still made mechanics where you whip slaves and shit, thats fucked up, even if it is for a joke.
To be fair, you have the same mechanics in RimWorld. You can also harvest their organs or make them addicted to drugs that will kill them if they don't consume regular doses for the rest of their lives.
And you can make furniture and hats out of people! To be fair though, there is no whipping slaves in the game. You can threaten them, scare the hell out of them by putting skulls on spikes, lobotomize them, cut off their legs and install permanent pain-inducing shit into their brains (the closest to actual torture you can get), etc., but you can't whip them. RimWorld is really interesting in that sense because it somewhat shows the strange and inconsistent limits of what people are willing to accept in their game.
I'd have to go find it, pretty sure theres mad evidence the RimWorld devs are chuds anyway. Sad.
For sure
I mean, this is how I felt about the horse girl racing game, whatever it was called. It was pure misogyny and I couldn't believe the hype it was getting. Give girls diamonds, force them to race for you, treat them like shit when they underperform? What the fuck was everyone thinking?
What?
Umamusume???
Yeah, that's the one.
But none of that happens in the game...
I literally watched streams do exactly what I said.
Was the stream in a language you don't know? I honestly don't know how you could misinterpret what was happening so poorly that you'd think any of that was true.
I don’t think I know of the “treat them like shit” bit.
Part of what happens in story mode is that you, as the trainer, ask the racer if she has particular racing goals (eg, win a certain cup) and the both of you work towards that.
Annoyingly, some of them even build unrealistically stupid expectations, like competing in an event they’re not good at…
That said, I’ll admit there have been times I had unreasonable gut reactions to little things in games. I didn’t like in Nier Automata how you had to kill animals for weapon upgrades, given that Earth is a desert planet mostly devoid of organic life as it is.
That was kinda the point of Nier Automata. You weren't supposed to like the things you did. That's a Hallmark of that entire series.
Please tell me you're talking about Horsey Game because that would be my favourite description of it ever, and perfectly in line with the intentional stupidity of that game. I don't remember a part with forcing girls to race for you but the whole thing is such a fever dream, it's plausible that I just forgot.
Lmao, no, not that one. The one with the waifus.