Remember Postal? In the last 48 hours publisher Running With Scissors has announced a new game, insulted fans, apologized, canceled the game, the studio making it denied wrongdoing, shut down anyway, and we can thank the magic of AI for all of it

The Postal series is essentially the videogame equivalent of Uwe Boll’s filmography*. They’re notoriously awful—the last one we reviewed was Postal 3 in 2012, which earned a dismal 21%—and they keep happening for some reason. A new addition to the lineup was announced on December 3, in fact, called Postal: Bullet Heaven. And then approximately 24 hours later, everything went very sideways.

“After revealing Postal: Bullet Paradise, a title Running With Scissors was planning on publishing but not developing, we’ve been overwhelmed with negative responses from our concerned Postal community,” RWS wrote on X, the day after Bullet Paradise was revealed. “The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.

“We’ve always been, and will always be, transparent with our community. Our trust in the development team is broken, therefore we’ve killed the project. We have a lot of good things coming (some you know and some you don’t).”

It’s very funny to think about a videogame that’s so odiously bad it doesn’t even meet the standards of the guys responsible for Postal, but this is where we find ourselves. “The concerned Postal community” also comes off as a knee-slapper, although that may be unfair: Postal 4: No Regerts, released in 2022, has more than 10,000 user reviews on Steam, and a Kickstarter for Postal 2 Redux more than doubled its $250,000 goal earlier this year.

Can I explain it? Absolutely not. But there is clearly a community of some sort here, they like what they like, and they do not like generative AI: Complaints about it are plentiful on the Postal subreddit and Steam.

The Postal: Bullet Paradise reveal trailer has been removed from the RWS channel but remains available elsewhere.

What makes all of this even more interesting is that it happened just a week after Running With Scissors weighed in on the AI labelling micro-controversy stirred up by Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney, who said last week that stores like Steam should stop labelling games made with AI because pretty soon everything’s going to be made with AI anyway.

“Customers deserve to know if a game was crafted with creativity, soul and actual talent rather than some machine that craps out anything from a prompt,” RWS wrote. “We don’t know what the future holds, but AI apologists like Mr. Sweeney are making this shit unbearable already.”

(Image credit: Running With Scissors (Twitter))

It’s a laudable stance—gotta hand it to ’em and all that—which was unfortunately undercut somewhat by the studio’s initial reaction to complaints about the new game. RWS executive Mike Jaret forcefully denied the allegations in now-deleted messages in the Postal Discord, which is maybe understandable in the moment—but then he took it a step further and said “the anti-AI mob has ruined art,” something of a contrast to the studio’s public anti-AI line in the sand.

There was also at least one ableist slur rolled out by a developer, which is possibly the least surprising thing amidst all of this, and it was all just very ugly and stupid, and everyone got good and mad about it. RWS later apologized “to anyone who felt insulted in the heat of the moment,” although it pointedly excluded anyone who sent death threats to the company over the new game, because of course there were death threats.

(Image credit: Running With Scissors (Twitter))

As it noted in the cancellation announcement, Running With Scissors was only set to publish Postal: Bullet Paradise. It was being developed by Russian studio Goonswarm Games—which, as far as I can tell, has no connection to Goonswarm of EVE Online fame—and the studio has denied the use of AI-generated art in the game. But it also said that, in the wake of “a large number of threats, insults, and mockery,” it’s decided to close its doors outright.

(Image credit: Goonswarm Games (Twitter))

This presumably means that Postal 2 Redux will be the next Postal game. It’s scheduled for 2026.

*Naturally, Boll’s oeuvre includes a Postal film released in 2007. Efforts to crowdfund a sequel in 2024 were, predictably, a complete shit show.