Look what it did for Hatred. it was a fast burn, but a burn that was brighter than most games ever see...Chimpzy said:
Active Shooter; thoughts on it?
- Thread starter Smithnikov_v1legacy
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- Apr 1, 2009
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Looks like crap. But, also looks like something that will be successful if only for the reactionary idiots who support it just to stick it to those "sjws." When this is the kinda thing that would actually force true censorship.
Dumb, tasteless, and almost certainly a bad game, but that does not mean it should not be allowed to exist or that Steam shouldn't sell it. Let the market decide if it succeeds or fails.
Steam needs to take this off the platform. Along with everything else that looks as minimal effort developed as this. Just to get rid of the asset flips, regardless of the content. As far as the controversy goes... there's no shortage of asshole momma's basement devs out there. So there is always going to be the "controversy game," no matter what the subject is. And none of them are really any good. The only one that was even partially positive was the assassinate Kennedy game, and that was just because of its attention to historical detail.
Reminds me of that terrible straight to dvd movie that was made shortly after the 2011 terror attacks over here. At the end of the day, i don't think there is any topic you can't cover in art, but when picking something as sensitive as this one, i would say there is an unspoken obligation to handle it with a certain ammount of care and consideration, which this blatantly isn't. I'd say this is rock bottom for cynical marketing in vidoe game. Maybe there is something worse somewhere in the sarlac pit of Steam by this point, i wouldn't know. Cynical marketing in itself has been around since the 90s, but so far no one has been stupid enough to pull a stunt like this, and for good reason.
They spent all this time trying to find out if they COULD, nobody stopped and thought whether or not they SHOULD.
Active Shooter is a game in poor taste, maybe it's trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. Hatred did the same thing, spinning itself controversy because otherwise the game was unremarkable and frankly rather poor.
Hatred at least looked like it had some effort put into it.
AS looks like shit.
However upsetting it might be. It has a right to be made and sold. Maybe Steam should have not approved it, and force AS to sell itself through independent means, but lets face it facts here; Steam doesn't give a shit about anything until it absolutely HAS too.
Either way AS is clearly just shitty controversy for the sake of it. Nobody will remember this game in six weeks.
Active Shooter is a game in poor taste, maybe it's trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. Hatred did the same thing, spinning itself controversy because otherwise the game was unremarkable and frankly rather poor.
Hatred at least looked like it had some effort put into it.
AS looks like shit.
However upsetting it might be. It has a right to be made and sold. Maybe Steam should have not approved it, and force AS to sell itself through independent means, but lets face it facts here; Steam doesn't give a shit about anything until it absolutely HAS too.
Either way AS is clearly just shitty controversy for the sake of it. Nobody will remember this game in six weeks.
In a sentence which throughout my lifetime I could never have imagined myself writing, I agree with Babyfarts.BabyfartsMcgeezaks said:
It's the gaming equivalent of clickbait, there purely to be controversial and get people's backs up. Tasteless garbage, a shame on the dev that made it, a shame on Valve for allowing it, but yaaay free market that allows dicks to be dicks and let karma sort it out. By releasing this, the dev got their 15 mins of infamy and essentially blacklisted themselves to most gamers, so good riddance.
That's the thing a lot of people are getting wrong though. Its not a free market... its VALVE's market. Valve taking the game off of Steam isn't censorship... the government forcing Valve to take a game off of Steam is censorship. Valve taking AS off of Steam, for whatever damn well reason they please... THAT's free market. That's a company doing what they want with their product. No developer has a "right" to sell their games on Steam.KingsGambit said:
I work at a radio station. I get a lot of complaints from listeners. "Ohh, you pre-empted this show." "Noo, you canceled that show." "I don't agree with that host." "I'm annoyed by this commercial." They generally only agree on a couple of things. Its MY fault and I HAVE to listen to them because they are customers, and if a show (like mine) is taking phone calls and I don't put them on the air then I'm censoring them and their freedom of speech.
First of all, listeners aren't customers. Customers give you money. ADVERTISERS are our customers. Listeners just benefit from being able to enjoy our programming. They provide us with ratings... which is a tool our sales execs can use to help them sell our product. But with a good enough sales team, ratings can be manipulated to speak to a variety of target audiences. Making listeners kind of useless to us really. A luxury, useless but nice to have. Second (and way more on target for the Steam analogy) listeners don't have any kind of "free speech" when it comes to our air time. We own that time and frequency, we choose what airs on it. If a listener calls me... I literally OWN that audio. I can record it, re-arrange the words, play it back on the air whenever and however I want. The "free market" allows me that power.
And that's the case with Steam. They don't "owe" any developer a place on their market. It isn't "censorship" if they remove a game... for whatever reason. Its just a business decision, and in this case... I think they are making the wrong one unless they get rid of AS. Its a free market, they need to do what is best for their business... ridding it of that cheap, manipulative crap.
***EDIT: Correction, DID make the right decision... eventually. I just saw that. Good for Valve... eventually making the right decision.***
Maybe, maybe not.KingsGambit said:
Hatred, while it didn't set the world on fire, did make a chunk of change simply by marketing it'self as something to "piss of the SJW's/Snowflakes". This might do the same.
And the developer got banned from Steam. Not for anything related to Active Shooter, it turned out that this developer account was a sock puppet for a dev that already got the boot.
https://www.pcgamer.com/active-shooter-and-its-developer-have-been-removed-from-steam/
https://www.pcgamer.com/active-shooter-and-its-developer-have-been-removed-from-steam/
Which just goes to show you how much Steam doesn't give a fuck. If that developer hadn't had a history, chance are that they would have left the game alone.erttheking said:
This game is incredibly tasteless and idiotic. Free speech is one thing, but when you?re exercising of that right is clearly little more than an effort to get a rise from people for profit?s/press? sake, you?re extremely childish; those rights are wasted on you and you shouldn?t be surprised to receive the very backlash you attempt to incite if for the wrong reasons. Had this game come out years ago, or at the very least not directly in the thick of an epidemic of the real-life tragedies it seeks to emulate, it might have gotten an exhaustive eye-rolling from most and been consigned to ?morbid power fantasy? (e.g.: GTA,) but seeing as we can?t seem to go a week without hearing about people being gunned down in public places, it?s clear it was grossly inspired and the devs lack the common sense and basic decency to even try to mask said inspiration. For fuck?s sake, it?s called ?Active Shooter;? they couldn?t come up with anything less ?red flaggy? than that? Of course not; how else could they garner their whorish attention when all they?ve got is a cheap asset flip? They say there?s no such thing as negative press and the dev was banking on that; hope this proves the old adage wrong and that sick fuck wrong.
The game looks like hot runny asshole. Only reason anyone is giving it the time of day is because of the obvious Outrage Bait the developers made sure to capitalize on. On it's own none of us would even give this asset flip garbage so much as a passing glance.
Well the problem with Valve is that they don't really react either. At least they don't do anything until the complaints get REALLY bad, and the behavior gets really shitty (I.E. see Digital Homicide's nonsense).trunkage said:
The problem with Active Shooter is not the controversy it baited, because quite frankly it would be just another shitty game on steam without this outrage. And hell maybe this outrage got the game some sales it otherwise wouldn't. Surely Ride to Hell: REtribution got a shitload of it's sales simple from the reputation of being a shitshow of a game right?
Sometimes bad press is good press, and sometimes games feed on the outrage machine to make whatever sales it can before it fades away into the trash bin.
I do think the outrage is overblown, but most outrage is. If you look at the history of every video game ever to be outraged against 99% of it is nonsense. GTA's crime and hot coffee mod, Mass Effect's sex scenes, etc etc etc.
Frankly you all should know by now that I think the outrage in most respects is foolishness. Everybody is outraged by everything, and it's getting to the point where now free speech is almost gone. People need to take a step back and think seriously about things.
Next time you are "offended" by something, sit back and ask yourself, "Should I really be bothered by this? How does this affect me? Can it harm me if I ignore it?"
The sad part is, I could come up with some ideas to make an actually interesting game out of it. Imagine something akin to CS with three teams: Shooter, Civvies, and SWAT.BabyfartsMcgeezaks said:
Shooter gets a configurable preset of weapons and staging from something akin to how PAYDAY 2 allows heist planning.
SWAT gets to choose a deployment on the fly once called in. Civvies can use weapons of opportunity as they present themselves, such as throw chairs, or striking with blunt objects - this is obviously not very effective but all civvies get bonus points if they take down the shooter.
Shooter and civvies look similar, and both have "class schedules" they are supposed to follow.
Civvies get points for following their schedules before they are aware of the shooter, and for time alive afterward. They are considered aware of the shooter after hearing gunshots/explosions, seeing the shooter with his weapon drawn, seeing any kind of staged property destruction, seeing the aftermath of such, seeing corpses/blood or getting close to another student who is aware of the shooter. Calling SWAT has a simple minigame attached, so that you can be shot while reaching for the phone.
Shooter gets points for killing civvies (with a hitlist who are worth bonus points) and especially property destruction. This encourages the shooter to do things like plant and arm bombs to blow up parts of the school (this involves a minigame to arm correctly, failure means either the bomb will not detonate or will detonate immediately, giving the shooter points for the damage but also ending his run) or start fires, which in turn takes time that makes him suspicious to other students when he's not in class. At the same time, that's time that civvies could be looking for evidence of the shooter to get SWAT moving faster.
SWAT gets points for every student that survives, and lose massive points for every student they cause the death of themselves.
SWAT joins when called by a student aware of the shooter or when there's been some event that makes it clear shit is going down from well outside the school, such as explosions, fires, an aware student actually fleeing the school safely, that sort of thing.
Every round, roles shuffle.
5 minutes and I've put more thought into it than the folks who made this trash.