On May 12, a developer going by FzzyBzzy released the wildly racist slavery simulation game Plantation Simulator onto Steam. Ten days later, Valve is still radio silent on this game, despite the fact that it pretty clearly violates multiple Steam content guidelines. Meanwhile, the game itself has taken an unexpected turn after its creator updated it, seemingly to troll all the gleefully racist people who bought it.<\/p>\n
Plantation Simulator was, I am sorry to tell you, exactly what it sounded like when it launched. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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: \u201cIn this game, you will be whipping black people to keep your farm productive. If you whip your black person too much, they will die.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the first week or so this game was live, it mostly flew under the radar. No reviews, no players really, according to SteamDB<\/a>. But around May 20-21, it started picking up. The Outer Haven caught wind of it early<\/a> and wrote a strong critique. 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\u2019s concurrent player peak was 109 individuals last night.<\/p>\n And that peak was\u00a0after the 1.2 update.<\/p>\n 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, \u201cIn this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.\u201d Since that update, the user reviews have entirely flip-flopped, with a cascade of negative reviews complaining now about a lack of diversity and a deceptive product. Again, most of these reviews have an hour or less playtime, and basically all of them include racist remarks.<\/p>\n The creator, FzzyBzzy, who bills themselves on Twitter\/X now as \u201cCreator of the worst games known to humanity\u00a0:3\u201d, seems gleeful about all of this. In their announcement of the second update last night, they wrote, \u201cHi gamers! We\u2019ve listened, and we heard YOU! We\u2019ve fixed ALL the issues you\u2019ve been wanting! We\u2019ve added hearts and little kisses for your friends as you become the best new age plantation owner ever! Good Luck! And Keep Gaming!!! UwU.\u201d Their tone on X is similar, up to and including a troll post<\/a> just a few hours ago in which they \u201cannounce\u201d their studio is closing and that they are laying off 200 employees. It\u2019s probably also worth pointing out that trolling seems to be the long-term norm for this creator, with their most recent release prior to this one being Crucifer, billed as \u201cthe worlds most Christian racing game ever developed\u201d and involving playing a Roman soldier and similarly beating slaves, men carrying crucifixes, and (inexplicably) a time-traveling sailor.<\/p>\n What\u2019s really baffling here, though, isn\u2019t that some troll is making racist games to both attract and then troll racist people. No, what\u2019s throwing me is: where is Valve in any of this? The company certainly has a long history<\/a> of inconsistent and lax moderation,<\/a> but its current content guidelines are pretty clear about both hate speech and games that are \u201cpatently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers,\u201d which this seems to be the very definition of. Meanwhile just last year, the IGF-award-winning horror game Horses<\/a> was banned from Steam despite developer cooperation and the final build seemingly containing nothing that violated Valve\u2019s guidelines, and was never allowed to be reinstated.<\/p>\n At the same time, a number of game developers have been speaking out<\/a> over the last year about Valve\u2019s lax moderation of content that violates its own guidelines<\/a>, specifically in the form of community posts, comments, and reviews. They claim that developers aren\u2019t given enough tools to moderate their own pages when individuals come in to harass or abuse them or their communities, but when they ask Valve for help, the company won\u2019t take meaningful action, even against user reviews that are actively abusive, racist, transphobic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve reached out to Valve for comment twice now about Plantation Simulator and haven\u2019t heard back, and the game remains on the Steam store at the time this piece was published.<\/p>\n Update 5\/22\/2026 4:24 p.m. ET:\u00a0<\/strong>Added a link to The Outer Haven\u2019s early story on the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On May 12, a developer going by FzzyBzzy released the wildly racist slavery simulation game Plantation Simulator onto…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":816357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[18227,158,67,132,68,80980],"class_list":["post-816356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-steam","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-valve"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116622718821807970","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}