Ready Or Not Back On Steam After Accidental Takedown

The popular early-access tactical shooter Ready or Not was removed from sale on Steam for over an hour earlier today.

This perplexed even the developers, who after the delisting posted on Steam stating:

Leadership has been made aware of the issue and we are currently looking into exactly what has happened. Please keep all the talk of the issue in this thread so that we don’t clog up the rest of the forum.

During the time it was down, one of the developers commented that they were trying to determine if it was a technical issue, or another legal issue similar to the 2022 situation where it was taken down due to a DMCA claim. Funnily enough, while in that case they initially mistakenly identified a Steam back-end issue being behind the takedown, something similar was actually the cause this time. In a final update on the case, one of the developers explained:

“Yup! Thankfully. It was an error on Steam’s end, they updated our store page based on some requested changes from a countries rating board, and just hit the wrong button. Just a simple mistake. “

These minor changes can sometimes happen on a page and are typically invisible, but in this case, they were very visible. It was especially notable in part because of Ready or Not‘s courting controversy due to mention of the possibility of doing a school shooter level in the past. This is a charged topic with the base premise of shooting at a school, given the number of school shootings in the USA and ongoing debates about the role of SWAT and police officers in those cases.

Ready or Not released in early access in early 2022, getting high marks for tactical gunplay, and creating a SWAT-type experience. Its realism and potential levels have unnerved some, with our previewer noting that the game kinda freaked them out, though it was already pretty far along even a year ago.

Ready Or Not Back On Steam After Accidental Takedown
Source: Pinay Guide Blog