Plantation Simulator is a video game currently available for purchase on Steam, the world's leading PC gaming platform. Its original content: whipping Black people to maximize the profitability of a slave plantation. A description that left no room for ambiguity: "you will whip Black people so that your farm stays productive."

Faced with the first wave of protests, the game's author modified it, not out of any genuine reckoning, but out of pure provocation. Black characters became "workers," then women in bikinis to whom players blow kisses. The game's current official description on Steam reads: "In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies." A deliberate sneer at everyone who dared to complain.

Recently, the game's author has claimed to be trying to remove the game from Steam himself, but struggling to do so.

We don't buy it for a second.

This is the same person who responded to calls for removal by replacing enslaved Black characters with bikini-clad women. This is not someone trying to make amends. This is someone who has demonstrated, at every single step, that mockery is the point. If anything, this new claim is just another layer of the same provocation, a performance of helplessness designed to buy time and generate more attention.

Which is precisely why we are not only calling for the removal of Plantation Simulator, we are calling on Valve to permanently ban the author from its platform entirely. A game can be deleted. A pattern of behavior is something else. As long as this developer retains access to Steam, nothing stops them from coming back tomorrow with a new title, a new provocation, and the same contempt for the communities they have chosen to target.

And Valve, Steam's parent company, has not said a word.

This silence is not neutrality. It is validation.

What makes Valve's inaction even more damning is that this story is no longer confined to gaming communities. Media coverage has grown significantly, and the controversy has been widely reported. Valve knows. And yet, the company continues to look the other way, still hosting, still selling, still collecting its cut. At this point, silence is not an oversight. It is a choice. And that choice implicates them fully. 

In France (the country where I live), the month of May commemorates the abolition of slavery. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the french law which recognizes the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. It is against this backdrop that Plantation Simulator was put on sale, purchased, reviewed  and tolerated by a platform that generates billions of dollars in revenue every year.

Plantation Simulator is not an isolated case.
Sex with Hitler, Playing History 2: Slave Trade and its infamous "Slave Tetris" mini-game, among many others are just some of the hateful content Steam hosts, monetizes, and shields with its silence.

It is time for Valve to take responsibility.

What We Are Asking For:

We call on Valve to immediately remove Plantation Simulator from Steam, to actively moderate hateful content in its associated forums, and to issue a clear public statement against racist content on its platform. And beyond this one game, we call on Valve to permanently ban its author from the platform — because tolerating a pattern of deliberate, racist provocation is not a policy. It is complicity.

In the meantime, we are calling for a boycott of Steam.
Choosing not to buy on Steam is a concrete, immediate act.

Alternatives exist and deserve your support:
- GOG.com,
- itch.io,
- Epic Games Store,
- Humble Store...

Gaming is a right. Tolerating racism is not.

Sign this petition to send a clear message that racist content has no place in digital spaces, or in our society  and that silence, when the whole world is watching, is no longer an excuse.