It was discovered earlier that horror game Devotion was pulled from Steam, but it was not clear who exactly took it down. That said, Red Candle Games, the developer behind the controversial title, have now provided a reason as to why they were the ones to pull it.
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In a statement on the Steam Community page for Devotion, the developers announced that they removed the game from the platform due to issues that were causing crashes as well as other unnamed reasons. “Due to technical issues that cause unexpected crashes and among other reasons, we are pulling Devotion off from steam store to have another complete QA check.”
This, of course, comes after the controversy arose from the game following the discovery of a Winnie the Pooh meme mocking Chinese president Xi Jinping, which eventually led to the game being review bombed.
“At the same time we’d like to take this opportunity to ease the heightened pressure in our community resulted from our previous Art Material Incident, our team would also review our game material once again making sure no other unintended materials was inserted in,” they continued. “Hopefully this would help all audience to focus on the game itself again upon its return.”
Red Candle Games was adamant about ensuring fans that the incident was completely by accident and was solely their fault. “Again, we apologize to our players, streamers and media friends for hurting your feelings,” Red Candle Games said. “We would also like to take this opportunity to reaffirm that Devotion‘s publisher Indievent and Winking Entertainment did not know about the art material beforehand and were not involved in this incident at all. Currently our partnership has terminated. Red Candle Games will take full responsibility to compensate the relevant loss based on the contract.”
It is currently unknown as to when Devotion will return to Steam, but if they are going over everything with a microscope to make sure something like the Winnie the Pooh meme isn’t still hiding somewhere, it might be a while before sales resume.
What do you think about this? Do you believe the controversy is the driving factor behind pulling Devotion from Steam, or were there bugs causing crashes? Sound off in the comment section below, or hit me up over on Twitter @anarkE7!
