The War Z pulled from Steam

Online zombie game The War Z has been removed from digital distribution service Steam due to its largely unfinished state.

The title from Hammerpoint Interactive was launched on Monday when it rose to the top-selling game on the platform. The game, described as a "foundation launch", has received a lot of criticism over a misleading feature list on its Steam listing and Valve are currently offering refunds to anyone filing a support ticket who has bought the game through Steam.

The Steam listing for The War Z claimed that it could support 100 players per server when the cap was actually 50, it boasted maps between 100-400 square kilometres in size when the largest map is 100k square kilometres, and skill systems and a friends list feature that are also not included. The developer has argued that the list was intended as a catalogue of upcoming features as opposed to features that are already implemented in the game.

Valve director of marketing Doug Lombardi told Rock Paper Shotgun that The War Z was prematurely issued on Steam and that further sales will be suspended until the company has time to 'work with the developer and have confidence in a new build'.

Although the game is no longer available on Steam, it can still be bought through the developer's website and already-purchased copies on Steam will still work.

The War Z positions itself as a free-to-play title with the client costing $15 minimum and featuring a large quantity of micro transactions. Before the game was pulled from Steam, Hammerpoint issued a patch to include a new feature that extended the 60 minute respawn timer on a dead character to four hours with an added button to respawn immediately if players cough up the equivalent of approximately $0.4 worth of purchasable game currency.