As I was putting together an article about Paradox Games, I realized that Stellaris had a recent review score on Steam of “overwhelmingly negative”, with 2000 recent negative reviews, and I thought to myself, “Oh, some strange update must have broken something”, but that feeling of schadenfreude had me looking into the comments to see what the hell was going on.

I started to see a lot of Turks commenting on it. Well, since Stellaris is a sci-fi game, and I’m pretty sure the Turks aren’t a faction you can pick in Stellaris, something was afoot. I went to look at Hearts of Iron IV, and the game is currently sitting at 26,000 overwhelmingly negative reviews. By now, the review disparity between Stellaris and Hearts of Iron IV instinctively told me that this was history-related. Europa Universalis is also getting review-bombed, same as Crusader Kings.

Since I couldn’t contain myself and suspected something fishy, I went on to investigate. Here’s what I managed to gather, which is almost all secondhand accounts, because Paradox has shut down new entries to their Discord, and some forum threads were closed.

A couple of days ago, on Paradox’s Discord, a user was allegedly banned for having a profile picture of a photo of Kamâl Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey and its first president from 1923 until 1938. The moderator banning the user allegedly claimed that Kamâl Atatürk was a “controversial” who might be connected to the Armenian genocide of 1915, where between half a million and one and a half million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire. This event is, to this day, a major point of contention in Turkey, with the country outright denying the existence of a genocide. This alleged ban and commentaries prompted the community to turn on Paradox and to begin a review bombing campaign of their games.

I tried to get on Paradox’s Discord to see their Code of Conduct about the usage of historical images, but since new admissions are now out of order, I could not confirm their stance on the matter. Comments on Reddit do mention that people must not use real historical pictures, but they’re free to use the assets available in the game, including the image of Kamâl Atatürk.

As someone who studied History, I do understand the feeling of having a beloved historical figure and their feats called into question, especially if it’s someone who’s widely beloved, as Kamâl Atatürk is. However, this whole affair is rather silly. If Paradox was already forbidding the usage of real imagery, then this should all be a non-issue, right? I do think this would have gone better if the ban had just been issued on those grounds, without any commentary calling Kamâl Atatürk a “controversial” figure.

Well, this situation prompted a response from Paradox, and on a screenshot I found in this Reddit thread, it appears to show Batya, the game director for Hearts of Iron addressing the community and acknowledging the historical significancy of Kamâl Atatürk, and that “neither our games nor our moderation are inteded as a comment or judgement on any historical figure, and this is no exception”, and realizing that there might have been some issue in the way rules are enforced, “especially whether this is done in an equal and fair manner”, and that “this rule will needs to be revised and has not been enforced consistently”.

Steam has already flagged the actions and restored the game’s score.

A huge newsday for the unemployed, indeed.