Update: Valve only blocked a creepy fascist Mount and Blade: Warband mod in South Korea, not worldwide, and the mod's own author took it down entirely

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The story now lines up with prior Valve moderation decisions.

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Update 7/7/25: Valve has reached out to clarify that the company did not remove the Gwangju Running Man mod from Steam worldwide, and that it had only blocked the mod's distribution in South Korea as it was in violation of South Korean law. According to Valve, the mod author was the one who removed it from Steam entirely in June. This puts Valve's actions more firmly in line with its prior moderation decisions outlined at the end of this story.

First reported by Korean gaming website This Is Game, and in English by Automaton, Valve acquiesced to a South Korean government request that it block distribution of an offensive Mount and Blade: Warband mod within the country. The mod was subsequently taken down by its author, leading to the misapprehension that Valve had banned the mod worldwide over South Korean law.

The 1980 protests in Gwangju against South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan were violently repressed by the government, provoking an armed uprising that Chun responded to with even greater brutality.

Up to 2,300 people were killed by government forces, and after the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Gwangju Uprising has been commemorated with a day of remembrance as a key moment in South Korea's struggle under a string of US-backed dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century.

Gwangju Running Man reportedly presented a revisionist narrative of the event popular with South Korea's right wing, one sympathetic to Chun Doo-hwan, slanderous to the memory of the victims and protestors, and justifying the massacres conducted by government forces.

This Is Game reported that the South Korean Game Rating and Administration Committee initially blocked the mod's distribution in South Korea before requesting that Valve remove the mod from the Steam Workshop worldwide, but Valve has clarified that it was only requested that the company block the mod's distribution in South Korea.

Typically, Valve operates under singularly laissez-faire content moderation guidelines, slow to respond to reports, and rarely removing mods or games from Steam unless they break the law, manipulate the platform in some fashion, or reach a critical threshold of negative attention. A few instructive examples include:

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Ted Litchfield
Associate Editor

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.