Valve bows to Kremlin: LGBTQ+ solitaire game [Flick Solitaire] pulled from russian Steam [cited a 2006 federal law prohibiting the "promotion of non-traditional sexualities"]
9 months ago by alessandro to c/pcgaming
It is, but the alternative is that everything would get pirated instead. And like Trump, Russia is fishing for a "woke" escape goat to continue to come up with excuses to shut down exposure outside of the state controlled media, which Steam provides.
If Steam goes out of Russia, there will be a state sanctioned pirate streaming service for games, and it will include spyware. Steam isn't just one entity, it is an entity for every country it decides to operate in.
Still, I'm not going to complete defend Valve on this, but at least they aren't pulling a "many gamers complained about this and we listened" card. They also didn't remove the game from the store in its entirely just because Russia was complaining, but limited access to it locally.
Maybe Valve should get out of Russia, but I don't see this negatively affecting Russians as much as it will make the bubble they live in even more closed off. VPNs would be an alternative if Russia wasn't criminalizing them.
They could just not comply? What's Russia gonna do, nuke Gaben's yacht?
They ignored (legitimate) youth protection laws long enough, they could ignore this one, too.
comply with the law
Because Google & Apple don't comply w/homophobic imperial out-border “laws.”
I don’t really get what anyone expects Valve to do here other than comply with the law.
Lol.
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 mean on the literal level, "'wokeness'" was used quotatively by Masters, as though somebody else had actually said that exact word. This is what strikes me as bizarre.
But also, the 'woke' thing is a new layer to the culture war that emerged in the late '10s. It was precipitated by similar disagreements over issues of social justice and affirmative action, of course, but not to the same extent or precision. However, Russia is acting consistently with how they acted a decade ago. So this is my weak argument that 'wokeness' is indeed not relevant here even in concept.
@lemmy.ca
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
go to feed...
@lemmy.ca
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
go to feed...
What a bizarre response. Neither Roskomnadzor nor Valve claimed this had anything to do with "'wokeness,'" and Steam was in fact transparent about this.
I don't really get what anyone expects Valve to do here other than comply with the law. Still, I'm surprised they're even able to operate in Russia given all the sanctions.
save