Zombie Survival MMO 'The War Z' Pulled From Steam
The War Z has been pulled from Steam due to user complaints.
Survival zombie MMO The War Z has been pulled from Steam's shelves just a day after its arrival. Users complained of factual inaccuracies and misleading information on the game's Steam page, some of which were posted on reddit.
Valve announced that it would investigate user concerns and pulled the game from Steam shortly after, issuing the following apology: "From time to time a mistake can be made and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here." The War Z is no longer available for purchase, although its Steam store page still exists.
Controversy has surrounded The War Z and developer Hammerpoint Interactive for a while now. It's gotten into trouble in the past for ripping their terms of agreement from Riot Games's League of Legends. The developer was too careless about the blatant plagiarism and didn't even bother removing a link to the League of Legends website from the agreement.
PC Gamer contacted The War Z's executive producer Sergey Titov in regards to the controversy. When asked about the game's removal from Steam, Titov responded, "No surprise, Valve contacted us to let us know their concerns based on some of the info circulating in the press and we completely understand their need to sort things out and make certain we are communicating correctly to their audience before we relaunch with them. They have an obligation first and foremost to their customers and we recognize that."
Titov also remarked that there'd be certain changes made to the hierarchy in response to the concerns raised, "Ultimately, it’s our responsibility and no fault of Steam at all," he said. "The description on Steam was basically reflecting a list of all the features that either our engine is capable of ( like number of players per server—which can be much higher than 100 for example) as well as our immediate development tasks. The big problem was with some internal communication. As a result of this mistake, our company board reviewed the situation today and we will be making some changes in our structure and with some of our key team members."
He also addressed some of the concerns raised in regards to the misleading information on The War Z's Steam page, writing them off as a "major disconnect between our development team and marketing team that resulted in some of the “coming soon” features being listed as current features on the Steam sales page."
According to Titov, Hammerpoint is currently working with Valve to restore the game back on Steam shelves. For now, the game is still purchasable via its official site. For players who purchased the game through Steam who didn't ask for a refund, the game will still be available to play.

They should have green lighted The Pinball Arcade instead of that shit.
They should have green lighted The Pinball Arcade instead of that shit.
Yeah, that could be a slight issue...
Okay that's just a fail.
That's just...
What this I don't even...
Forge, WarZ, Ace of Spades.
Forge is just straight up missing features from its progression system and half the menu options are greyed out.
WarZ is still in beta and is just missing too much. 20 bucks for a one small map game with half of the mechanics missing? On top of that there is a cash shop... What the hell? (hell it even says "Alpha version" on some of the ui elements)
Ace of Spades had perfect netcode during beta when it had a different direction but when it launched it is virtually unplayable online due to lag. Pretty awful for an online only game.
These are just examples of games I have purchased lately.
I've personally worked for a company that waned to make a Sharepoint type service. The Marketing team asked a team of one $10/hr programmer "what does Microsoft use to create Sharepoint ?" - said probably Visual C++. "Do we have Visual C++ ?" , programmer "Yes", marketing "Great, we can tell the customers we have all the parts needed and we can deliver next week".
If true, the users that have been banned for that "reason" should pursue legal options. This is definitely a case where I don't think people would blame you for doing so.
It's not acceptable to give someone money and be treated in that manner by them.
You're right. I had a massive brain fart when I was writing this last night. Fail!
It's been fixed. Thanks!
- Catherine Cai
I remember when a guy called Wartourist did that to people reporting problems and bugs with the PC version of Gears of War when it first came out. Back then the game would wipe out its save files, crash in the same locations, and generally run like the worst port ever. I decided never to buy an Epic game again following what came out of that debacle. Hammerpoint has done the exact same thing which means I won't purchase their products either. Very sleazy developers! There are so many other companies I can support instead.
One of the developers is RussianKiller. He denied that he was part of the development until was busted one too many times.