Hood Warfare 2, a $5 gang shooter on Steam, is going viral

ChloeOctober 14, 20266 min read

A $5 first-person shooter called Hood Warfare 2 has gone from near-obscurity to one of Steam’s most talked-about releases in less than a week. Given the nature of the game, however, it’s also drawn scrutiny for its content, its anonymous developers, and the creators who’ve played it live on stream.

Made by an anonymous dev team called TrapStar Games, Hood Warfare 2 is a gang-themed, multiplayer Call of Duty clone set in “the streets” of Chicago, Illinois. Like Call of Duty, it has killstreaks, including a “drive by” and a “snitch,” its version of the UAV drone.

According to SteamDB data, it peaked at about 53 concurrent players on its Oct. 8 release day. Its player count climbed steadily before spiking past 11,700 on Oct. 12, with its all-time peak now at 15,258 as of this writing.

By Steam’s standards, that is a modest hit. The game’s peak rank is around 1,151st all-time on SteamDB, and its current player count of roughly 4,000 puts it at 239th. Still, if Gamalytic’s data is to be believed, Hood Warfare 2 has grossed $1.1 million with 219,000 units sold.

As you can tell from the title, the game is a sequel. TrapStar released Hood Warfare, a Detroit-based shooter, in 2023 to little fanfare, with an all-time Steam peak of 68 players. Hood Warfare 2 caught on in a big way thanks to a deluge of content creators and streamers amused by the exaggerated stereotyping of Black American gang culture.

That said, much of the online conversation does center on the game’s depiction of Chicago and Black communities.

Critics argue the game feeds a long-running narrative, pushed by right-wing outlets and influencers, that Chicago is one of the most dangerous cities in the country. The rankings they cite tell a different story. Despite being the nation’s third-largest city, Chicago ranks outside the top 10 on a list of places with the highest crime risk, according to U.S. News & World Report. Others have noted that the game’s trailer uses virtually none of Chicago’s actual slang.

The popularity of these kinds of stereotypes of the Black community coincides with the rise of YouTube “gang war explainer” channels, such as TrapLoreRoss. These channels break down real local conflicts for largely outside audiences, turning figures like King Von and Chief Keef, along with the O-Block area around Parkway Gardens into a kind of online lore. On TikTok, you can find several videos of creators traveling to the Parkway Gardens area near 63rd Street and King Drive.

Speculation on social media about Hood Warfare 2 includes accusations of AI “vibe coding,” astroturfing, and even claims that the game is a “CIA psyop.” Defenders of the game are dismissing the backlash, stating that games like Hood Warfare 2 aren’t meant to be taken seriously.

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The game holds a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, and many reviews lean into the stereotypes critics object to. One reviewer wrote that they could “feel the thrill as a white man roleplaying as an african american gang banger.” Another called it “Counter-Strike meets Boyz n da Hood,” a reference to John Singleton’s 1991 film, which is widely read as a critique of the forces that kill young Black men.

Playing a part in the game’s growing popularity is the enthusiastic embrace from content creators and live streamers. Gameplay videos have spread quickly across YouTube and Twitch. Some thumbnails show creators, including white creators, posing in ski masks to match the game’s theme. Many YouTube uploads have titles that call the game “Hood Call of Duty.”

YouTube thumbnail with white man in ski mask. The title reads"The new HOOD Call of Duty is HERE and INSANE!"

Thumbnail from YouTuber MrMG titled “The *NEW* HOOD Call of Duty is HERE and INSANE!”
Credit: YouTube / Mashable screenshot

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Not every attempt to stream the game has gone smoothly.

On Oct. 13, members of the YouTube comedy collective RDCWorld, which has 7.3 million YouTube subscribers and 963,000 Twitch followers, tried to play the game on stream after being repeatedly tagged in it posts about it on Twitter and Reddit. Much of their chat objected. The group dropped the game shortly after and moved on to Star Wars: Galactic Racer .

A clip of the exchange has since circulated on Reddit. In it, a viewer donates $20 with a message offering to pay the group not to play what they called a “racist cia made game.” RDCWorld member Mark Phillips, who is Black, pushed back, saying he hadn’t expected viewers to go “straight think piece” on the game.

When Phillips questioned whether the group should then skip Grand Theft Auto VI, which launches in November, fellow member Dylan Patel said that both games are “the same thing.” Critics argue that comparison is a false equivalence. Games like GTA and Def Jam have drawn their own controversy over how they portray Black communities, they say, but they’re fundamentally different from Hood Warfare 2 and shouldn’t be lumped in with it.

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Within the RDCWorld subreddit, many commenters criticized the group’s defensive response more than the attempt to play. Some accused stream moderators of timing out viewers who disagreed. Others defended RDCWorld, arguing that gang culture is not Black culture and that taking offense further entrenches that stereotype of the Black community. RDCWorld has not addressed the controversy outside the stream.

Who is behind TrapStar Games?

Little is known about who made Hood Warfare 2. The game appears to have been built in Unity 5, although there are unverified claims that it was AI vibe-coded.

The devs’ purported website, Trapstar.games, was registered on Oct. 12, according to ICANN lookup data. The site displays a copyright notice, but a search of public copyright records found no registration under the name TrapStar Games.

The website’s linked Twitter account also claims to represent the developer. It was created this month and has been promoting a cryptocurrency token called HW2. The account’s bio lists New York, while its “About this account” panel shows it is based in the U.S. and connected through the Turkish App Store.

Neither the account nor the website could be confirmed to belong to the game’s developers, and it’s possible that a third party is exploiting the game’s popularity to run a pump-and-dump scheme. One reply to the account claims a developer denied any connection to that Twitter account and the crypto token on the game’s Discord server. That server could not be located.

A request for comment sent to an email address listed on the original Hood Warfare website has not been returned.

Source: https://mashable.com/life/hood-warfare-viral-controversy-rdcworld