Valve Remains Silent As Racist Plantation Sim Game Trolls Everyone

A top-down simulation game on Steam lets players act as Southern plantation owners who force Black enslaved people to grow crops under threat of being beaten. The game originally included a mature content description stating that players would whip Black people to keep the farm productive and that excessive whipping could cause death. After initial low visibility, attention increased as reviewers and creators discussed it, with many positive reviews containing racist commentary and short playtime. After a 1.2 update, the Black slave characters were changed to appear as white women in bikinis. A subsequent update altered the whipping animation into hearts and replaced the mature content description with a message about friends wearing bikinis and giving kissies. Reviews then shifted dramatically.

"Plantation Simulator was, I am sorry to tell you, exactly what it sounded like when it launched. 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. The game had an actual mature content description appended to it from launch until roughly midday yesterday that read, verbatim: "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.""

"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. Various YouTubers and personalities began mentioning it, some rightfully critical, others disturbingly celebratory. 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."

"And that peak was after the 1.2 update. Posted later in the day yesterday, the 1.2 update changed the Black slave characters in the game to what appears to be white women in bikinis. A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, 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, with a cascade of ne"

Read at Kotaku