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.
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 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.
The creator, FzzyBzzy, who bills themselves on Twitter/X now as “Creator of the worst games known to humanity :3”, seems gleeful about all of this. In their announcement of the second update last night, they wrote, “Hi gamers! We’ve listened, and we heard YOU! We’ve fixed ALL the issues you’ve been wanting! We’ve added hearts and little kisses for your friends as you become the best new age plantation owner ever! Good Luck! And Keep Gaming!!! UwU.” Their tone on X is similar, up to and including a troll post just a few hours ago in which they “announce” their studio is closing and that they are laying off 200 employees. It’s 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 “the worlds most Christian racing game ever developed” and involving playing a Roman soldier and similarly beating slaves, men carrying crucifixes, and (inexplicably) a time-traveling sailor.
What’s really baffling here, though, isn’t that some troll is making racist games to both attract and then troll racist people. No, what’s throwing me is: where is Valve in any of this? The company certainly has a long history of inconsistent and lax moderation, but its current content guidelines are pretty clear about both hate speech and games that are “patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers,” which this seems to be the very definition of. Meanwhile just last year, the IGF-award-winning horror game Horses was banned from Steam despite developer cooperation and the final build seemingly containing nothing that violated Valve’s guidelines, and was never allowed to be reinstated.
At the same time, a number of game developers have been speaking out over the last year about Valve’s lax moderation of content that violates its own guidelines, specifically in the form of community posts, comments, and reviews. They claim that developers aren’t 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’t take meaningful action, even against user reviews that are actively abusive, racist, transphobic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted.
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment twice now about Plantation Simulator and haven’t heard back, and the game remains on the Steam store at the time this piece was published.
