What Steam should do, and what every other country and business should do is leave russia (and israel etc etc etc). They should completely stop importing or exporting until that country starts to play nice with others.
The. Fucking. End.
If they are invading/causing genocide/generally be cunts then 100% ignore and sanction that country. Nothing in, nothing out. Physically or digitally. Nothing. Fuck 'em until they stop being scummy pieces of shit.

It won’t happen, obviously, because nearly every politician and upper corporate ghouls are corrupt. But that’s what should happen.

Not a defense, but aren’t a lot of the steam games at least runnable without the front end?

Not as much as GOG obviously, but some ?

I don’t see how it advances any objective like Ukraine or identity politics issue by Valve not being in Russia. On the contrary, the more people buy from valve puts currency strain on Russia and exports western culture to them.

That just fucks over gamers, not the Russian government.

The alternative is to stop doing business in places where laws are being used to restrict the games available.

Don’t get me wrong, fuck the russian government and the horse they rode in on, but unless you have a defend-able reason that russia should be singled out in this context your argument is emotional rhetoric and little else.

You could perhaps narrow that down to a subset of applicable laws, but i’d lay good money that any group/type of laws you pick are not go only contain russia and still be able to be considered a reasonable argument.

I’d assume the argument is the same kind of one made for sanctions, you restrict the interaction with the country to indicate you are displeased with some action(s) that government has taken.

It’s not a good argument , mind you.

It’s called “complying with the law”.

These comments are shit. Who said that you should comply with Russia’s laws???

I play online games since counterstrike 1.4 came out. If russians lose access to online games, it would make every online game in europe better. It sucks for them, but maybe they need their own servers so they can be toxic to themselves.

There’s a thin red line that tie both Putin’s oligarchs and Trump’s oligarchs: “wokeness” is a concept fabricated by the latter but is completely compliant with Russian’s 2006 federal law. They can’t formalized that freedom of people doesn’t matter, they need to make-up a blurry concept of “tradition” and a vague concept of something that may corrupt the aforementioned joke (“traditional values”: the one between the traditional human ape rape cave and matrimonial rites after human ape pack raided another pack and took their females)

I think that is the wrong approach. North Korea is the result of what you advocate for, a people who do not know the possibility of other lifestyles. The complete isolation of a country is similar to locking up a child in a basement: It corrodes the mind and prevents escape for something better.

This isn’t to say that Russia, Israel, nor North Korea shouldn’t be impacted by their harmful characters. Instead, they should be treated like post-WW2 Japan, where outsiders force reforms. In Japan’s case, that was the dismantling of mega-corporation zaibatsu, ensuring democratic voting, removing previous leadership, reconstruction programs, and so forth.

It isn’t much different from tending a garden, where you both help and harm to ensure that the best plants get ahead of weeds.

Okay, yeah, I see what you mean.

Yeah, I dunno, I think I don’t feel like it’s the most effective way to fight the war machine, to restrict non-enlisted from playing games lol. They are giving money to Valve anyway. Not being able to buy games wouldn’t affect someone negatively, I feel. If anything it might make them richer and more productive.

I fed up to see the discourse about steam being the best thing since sliced bread. Its a shitty company, pro censure, anti lgbt, anti owning game, with another oligarch ceo . I exclusively use GoG now

Money, I guess. GabeN needed a new yatch

Lots of indie games yes, but not so many of the AAAs

Afaik no. Some games will run with steam open in offline mode without an internet connection but that’s about it.

This is a very naive and ignorant take. In the major cities, quality of life is on part with EU for many.

Furthermore, even with demographic splits (e.g. russians aged 18-24, urban russians), all major demographic groups show at least strong majority support for chauvinism, authoritarianism and genocidal imperialism.

There are some variations of course. But it’s more along the lines of overwhelming/near absolute majority support (e.g 50+) or strong majority support (18-34). You also find interesting variantions where “middle age” segments tend to be less supportive (on a relative basis, the segment as whole still shows strong majority support) of genocidal imperialism than young adults/early middle age (18-34); likely because they have more to lose.

Russians have the capability to build a better future for themselves (without invasions), they just don’t want to because they haven’t gotten a taste of their own medicine (where they are treated like they treat others).

EU is massive in enabling this attitude. Consider the fact that Merkel, even from retirement, is promoting russian genocidal imperialism by claiming that Poland and the Baltic nation are responsible for the full scale invasion:

Access Denied

(www.telegraph.co.uk)

When it’s the russians and putin (a symptom, with the cause being russians) who are to blame for their own invasion.

This is the most sane take I’ve seen. It’s honestly weird how ignorant this thread is, regional censorship is not new. Australia has a habit of banning violent games. The Middle East and China have a habit of censoring all sorts of things. Many countries have their own laws of what is and isn’t okay and they fluctuate all the time. My friend in Germany couldn’t play Wolfenstein because any games with Nazi imagery were illegal until relatively recently.

Literally every company that operates in those countries also censor their stuff. The only reason this article exists is because [thing but Russia] gets more clicks and outrage compared to [thing in fifty other countries]. You’re free to hate Steam for it but this isn’t weird or exclusive behavior. They’re running a business.

I wonder if the same people who say Steam should pull out of Russia would agree that Steam should also pull out from the US. I mean, that’s what should happen given the basis of the arguments being used, right?

All the games will run in offline mode, unless they specifically require the steam services to start, like anticheat and stuff. It’s a gamedev decision, not Valve’s