Zombie Survival MMO 'The War Z' Pulled From Steam

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.

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