10 DUMBEST Video Game Controversies That Went Too Far

5. Everybody Hates Hatred

Hatred game
Destructive Creations

From the very second it was announced, Hatred came under fire for its ultraviolent content, with the game letting players assume the role of a mass-murderer who kills hundreds of humans in a manner of violent ways, simply because he wants to.

As well as being criticized by the gaming community at large, Epic Games asked developer Destructive Creations to remove the Unreal logo from the trailer, Valve pulled the game from Steam Greenlight, and video game marketplace GOG flat-out refused to sell it.

All this controversy made it seem like Hatred was going to cause riots in the streets, but predictably, when it eventually came out in June 2015, everyone realised that it was just a mediocre game that had leveraged shock value to generate some press.

It scored a 43/100 on Metacritic - with an equally-sucky 4.7 user score to match - and vanished from the conversation after barely causing a stir.

This situation echoed similarly overblown controversies surrounding games like Postal and GTA, and, seemingly realising that they were creating a fuss over nothing, Valve even u-turned on its decision to pull the game.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!