Special edition of Dead Island Riptide is offensive and stupid

Deep Silver is using a headless female torso statuette to promote its Dead Island: Riptide special edition for Australia.

It's called the Zombie Bait Edition, and the collectable hook for potential purchasers is a busty, bloodied female torso. It's available for Europe and Australia.

Not surprisingly, the outcry has been enormous, with most people being disgusted by the sexualisation of a severed torso. PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun's John Walker said:

It's as if someone were attempting to demonstrate the most misogynist idea that could possibly be conceived, in an attempt to satirise the ghastly trend. A textbook example of the most extreme ends of misogynist fantasy, a woman reduced to nothing but her tits, her wounds hideously depicted in gore, jutting bones and, of course, barely a mark covering her globular breasts.

Deep Silver quickly apologised, stating in part:

For the limited run of the Zombie Bait Edition for Europe and Australia, a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead enemies in the original Dead Island.

We sincerely regret this choice. We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver's entire international team today. For now, we want to reiterate to the community, fans and industry how deeply sorry we are, and that we are committed to making sure this will never happen again.

Impressively, even the Dead Island: Riptide dev, Techland Games, said on Twitter that "it was not something we would have done", but was glad that Deep Silver had recognised its mistake.

There's been no statement on whether this edition will still come to market. We'll update as more new comes to hand.