A small team of Australian developers got their game making fun of #BlackLivesMatter banned from the Google play store due to “hate speech.”
The game made by Limited Software is a tower defense where police must defend their station from an army of BLM protesters. The game includes real quotes from BLM supporters like DeRay Mckesson, Bioware dev Manveer Heir, and randos on Twitter.
One of the game’s creators, Raj Patel, took to Medium to tell the story of the banned game. Within a day of submitting their game to Google Play, Google denied the request claiming the game violated their hate speech policy: “We don’t allow apps that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
The actual text of the game was likely not the problem, but the violation probably relates to the goal of the game, which is to shoot the pixelated protesters, which many would no doubt find highly offensive. The game was also banned from itch.io.
Patel argues that his game is not hate speech as BLM does not necessarily constitute a specific race and that two out of the three character models are white.
Limited Software has a similar game on the Google Play store, except the BLM protesters are replaced with lizard people.
Google has historically been controversy-averse in terms of allowing games into their app store. In the past they have banned a dogfighting simulator and a game that allowed you to force African miners to dig up minerals used to make iPhones.
The Play Store does not have a comparable game that is openly hostile to police, although it does have Grand Theft Auto and other games that let you play as criminals to fight police.
While #BlackLivesMatter the game has been banned from major retailers, the game can still be downloaded on the developer’s personal website. And whether or not the game’s ban is an issue of free speech or simply a private company keeping their PR team happy, is still up for debate.
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