Steam Sends Boilerplate Message To Gamemaker For Angering Russian Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigots
from the victim-blaming dept
When Russia kicked off its war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine for completely made up reasons, there were global efforts to isolate Russia as a result. Many of those efforts have waned in the years since, unfortunately. You may recall that there was a small effort among video game companies and platforms to deny sales and service to Russia as part of this cultural blockade. While the war still rages on, and anyone who wants to can call all of this effort a failure, the point is that gaming companies and platforms took something of a moral stand against Russia as a result of the war.
Valve’s Steam platform was involved in that effort, though that may have had as much to do with payment processing sanctions as any kind of moral stand. Today, Valve is back to operating in Russia, and it appears to have no issues with some of the country’s more notoriously bigoted laws and postures when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. Recently, the maker and seller of several visual novel style games found her games delisted and a message from Valve chastising her for not following Russia’s bigoted laws.
Ebi-hime, the developer behind yuri visual novels like Her Love, Like Poison and Rituals in the Dark, posted on X that Valve notified her that some of her games had been banned from the storefront in Russia after Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency in charge of censorship in the country, determined those projects to be in violation of the country’s rules for distribution. That in and of itself isn’t surprising considering Russia has woven anti-queer legislation into its laws and even designated queer activism as an “extremist” movement. What is surprising is that Valve’s copy-pasted message on the situation is condescending and victim-blamey. It reads in part:
We also want to remind you that you promised Valve under the Steam Distribution Agreement that your games comply with all applicable laws. Therefore, it is your responsibility to do your due diligence regarding where your games are allowed to be distributed, and to inform us of any territory where they cannot be.
Now, if you want to make the herculean effort it requires to take Valve’s side on this, you could argue that operating within a country like Russia necessarily requires an adherence to its local laws. And perhaps you want to argue that that’s all that Valve is doing here.
Except operating within Russia is a choice. Platforms are only neutral to a point. And if you make the use cases more extreme, it betrays just how much of a choice this all is.
Imagine if a country required all video games sold within its borders to prohibit any female characters within the game from speaking. Or one which prohibited any person of color from appearing in a game at all. Or one which required all characters to both be of a certain religion and to profess their faith in that religion. Would Valve still operate within any of those countries? If they did, you would imagine the backlash to be rather extreme.
But, for some reason, Russia essentially outlawing the appearance of any LGBTQ+ characters in games doesn’t quite get Valve’s fur up. Is the morality around my examples and this real occurrence all that different? Are they any different?
And, frankly, couldn’t Valve have done this better than sending what is likely a boilerplate message to someone who is actively being discriminated against that sure sounds like its blaming the victim?
Not that I would expect Valve to take a proper stance against something like the Russian government. I just think that if you’re going to take the stance of compliance that it is taking, you can at least be mindful of how you talk to people using your platform about it. If you don’t want to buy Ebi-hime’s games on Steam, they are also available on itch.io.
Obviously, we don’t look to the monied interests of large corporations for moral clarity. But we can certainly hold them accountable for failing to take even the easiest of moral stances with our dollars, if we want to.
Comments on “Steam Sends Boilerplate Message To Gamemaker For Angering Russian Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigots”
This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I despise the move towards age verification: Once it’s implemented effectively in one part of the world, it’ll be implemented in other parts as well—and sooner or later, the companies that implement it will use the strictest guidelines from one part of the world to “hide” content around the world so it’s “easier” to not have to worry about a hundred different legal quagmires. The loudest assholes will have the greatest say in what content is hidden behind age verification; sooner or later, they’ll have it over what content could be allowed even after age verification. You think that Roots ban was bad? Imagine that book being age gated around the world only because some American bigot got mad. That is the future we’re looking at here.
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And we already know that there are groups in the US that are pushing for any acknowledgment that gay or trans people exist be classified as “adult” and gated away from kids or anyone who refuses to participate in the age-gate fantasy so companies will be incentivized to hide it all away.
I read the linked Kotaku article but I’m still unclear here. Russia goes to Steam and says “XYZ game violates our laws”, Steam delists the game and sends a message to the developer telling them the game is delisted. Steam does nothing to punish the developer. The games in question are still available everywhere else. Literally no one is hurt (except Russian yuri fans who (still?) don’t have a VPN). How would you expect this to go over? What would have been the better way to handle it? I’ve never released a game on Steam but presumably developers have some sort of choice or control over where their games are listed and this person checked a box somewhere that effectively said “sell my game in Russia, I certify that this complies with all laws blah blah blah”.
Steam is not going to send a lawyer to Russia on behalf of some indie VN dev to argue a case to argue that Her Love, Like Poison should be legal. For one, that’s the dev’s job, no Steam’s. For two, it’s pointless because Russia is an absolute monarchy with no actual rule of law. For three, as unjust and stupid as the laws may be, yeah these games very clearly do violate them. Steam isn’t in the business of deciding whose laws are worth complying with and whose aren’t.
Maybe the dev should just change the storefront art for these games to include a subtitle like “Too sexy for Russia!” Maybe it’ll drum up sales, and given that these games are so small that they don’t even generate one one review per day normally every little bit would help.
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The better way to handle it, is to rephrase the message sent to the dev, so that it doesn’t chide her for failing to remind them that Russian Govermnment is a a pack of homophobic bigots.
The even better way, would be for Valve, to do what other companies have done and simply decide that operating in Russia isn’t worth the trouble.
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Valve could have refused to censor the game and accepted the consequences of that decision. That would’ve been a better decision.
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Russia (and kinda-communist countries around) is a big gaming market (maybe because gaming is much fun than listening to Putin, even he once wanted Russia to create a Playstation 3 killer), consuming mostly for games from Western studios, and as always, if Steam doesn’t get a fair share of this market, other companies will fill the blank (certainly with less content) and Steam won’t get a cent.
Same thing happened with Google when China wanted to restrict the search engine. Google started by showing the middle finger then China said it would develop it’s own search engine, so Google agreed to pretty much everything.
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An answer so obvious, it’s a wonder that the question was even asked….
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So which countries’ laws is Steam supposed to ignore? Who is going to make that decision and how is that determination made? Do you have any sort of legal guidelines that Steam could follow for determining which laws in particular can be ignored? Should they do the same for US laws they don’t like at the risk of being fined, sanctioned, or imprisoned?
This whole “you ought to take a stand” business is ridiculous. It is the very bottom rung of slacktivism.
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Please note the way steam scolded the developer:
So now to post to steam I need to become familiar with content laws as they apply to every country steam operates, and keep a continuing education for as long as I list on steam? Seems like a lot of burden on the developer who doesn’t have a choice in where steam lists in the first place.
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Does Valve have any staff in Russia? I don’t know the requirements for operating in Russia are but having a represenative there wouldn’t be unheard of. Ignoring laws could hurt someone else.
I know ideally Valve wouldn’t be there to begin with.
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“Steam isn’t in the business of deciding whose laws are worth complying with and whose aren’t.”
That is exactly the business that Steam are in. That’s precisely the choice they’ve made by selling in Russia.
You don’t have a fucking clue son.
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“What would have been the better way to handle it?”
A better way — which doesn’t even require an attorney — would be to tell the Russian government to go straight to hell, and then to completely remove Steam’s presence from Russia.
But there’s a problem with that: it would require some things Steam doesn’t have, like courage. Like principles. Like ethics. Like the willingness to give up revenue in order to take a stand. (And to make a sound business decision: “Steam told the Russians to go to hell” would be excellent promotional material.)
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I would have assumed Steam checks every country’s box by default, and it’s on the developer to research the laws of 237 countries + how many states/provinces to ensure their game doesn’t break them. And when they fail, Valve (apparently) gets snippy.
This would be a non-story if Valve had sent the developer a message saying “We’ve delisted your games from sale in Russia because they violate the law there.” It was the and you should have known that that made it newsworthy.
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“I have no idea what I’m talking about but I’m going to take a wild stab at it anyway.”
Steam is not going to send a lawyer to Russia on behalf of some indie VN dev to argue a case to argue that Her Love, Like Poison should be legal. For one, that’s the dev’s job, no Steam’s.
Nobody suggested that should be the case, but it is Steam’s job to understand the laws of the countries it decides to operate in, not the dev’s.
Nice of Valve to let everyone know they are not playing games.
'We're not saying we're on russia's leash... except we totally are.'
Siding with russia and the bigots running it even as it continues it’s war with Ukraine, either Steam decided it wanted to try to appeal to the MAGAt crowd or someone couldn’t be bothered to ask their PR team how well this would look for the company in the current climate.
They could have come out of this looking while not great at least not as terrible as they do, shooting a message telling the developer that while they don’t have a problem with the existence of LGBTQ+ people(they have money to spend too after all) they did consider throwing that entire group under the bus if it meant access to the market an acceptable trade, and as a result they can’t sell the game in that country, but nope, boilerplate message that blames the developer for either accidentally or deliberately offering their games for sale in that country run by warmongerers and bigots.
Of course, if Valve were to exit Russia on the justified moral grounds, it would open the door for sketchy storefronts who want to imitate Steam for their own defrauding purposes while giving Steam a bad name. It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
That boilerplate message needs to ditch the victim blaming tone. If that wasn’t there, this isn’t even a story in the first place.
Russia has ... even designated queer activism as an “extremist” movement.
You forgot to link to your reporting on how the current US administration is basically doing the same thing. Seriously, you all have a lot of work ahead of you if you ever want to remotely repair things in your country.
Well, how does Valve respond to American anti-LGBTQ+ Bigots who want to ban content they don’t like?
It's a choice
Yes. Doing business in Russia is a choice. And as Valve gently pointed out – the developer made the choice to distribute in Russia, despite everything. The fact that all they got was a weak talking to seems generous in my opinion.
You seem dead set on only criticizing Steam for choosing to do business in Russia, but the developer also made that choice; they too chose to do business in Russia. They chose to do this in spite of Russian law, and in spite of Steam’s warning that developers need to follow applicable laws in countries where they chose to distribute (duh!). You might say that the developer gets to sit on a high horse here, for sending LGBTQ games into the heart of Russia (I admit this really makes me giggle too!) but then Valve gets a gold star too for facilitating this until the legal filings started dropping in.
Do I think Steam should be making business in Russia or China? No. I think the west should stop doing business with dictatorships completely as it supports and legitimises the regimes, and gives them control over our industrial base. But… the west seems to like cheap shit and access to big markets more than human rights and other pesky details. But, in this respect Valve is absolutely no worse than any other American mega corp.
I do however think it’s absolutely ridiculous to somehow try to lay the blame squarely at the feet of Valve and Steam after this developer literally decided to distribute a game in Russia that is obviously illegal in Russia. Valve is a popular punching bag these days, but come on… This was self inflicted. What did you think was going to happen?
As for the “victim blaming,” all Steam did was point out that it’s the developer’s responsibility to make sure that the developer’s product is legal in the countries where the developer chooses to distribute. How exactly is this unfair and discriminatory by Valve? Where exactly does the victim blaming come in, because I can’t see it anywhere.
You should take all this fuming outrageous indignation and aim it towards Russia, towards Putin, towards the oligarchs, towards the human rights violations, towards the politicians that love to do business with the NEWSSR, like the entire god damn Trump regime. Maybe you should even aim a little at Google, Valve and other megacorps but…
This is silly.
Re: It's a choice
Except the developer didn’t specifically choose to distribute their game to Russia, knowing it was against the law. The choose Steam as a vehicle for the distribution. Blaming the developer is like blaming an author for selling a book that violates a Russian law to a distributor, who then decides to try to sell it in Russia. They had no control over where Steam tried to sell it.
Oddly enough, Valve has the capabilities to just not offer certain games to people with-in certain borders. If this were not true then things like PUBG and millions of other games would be banned and never existed, even games from bigger companies like Epic.
“Queers bad, genocide good.” – Russians and Conservatives
Nothing new here
Germany has done this for ages with political content. You cannot release a game for sale in Germany with Nazi symbolism in it without explicit approval of the German games rating board, and that’s only since the law was changed in 2018, before that it was entirely banned. Famously, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus had to change all the imagery and names (including that of Hitler) in order to be released in Germany.
Australia has banned specific content in games as well. A ton of countries ban video games for content the government disapproves of. You can see a good sample here worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/banned-video-games-by-country if you want to check some out.
The real issue here is Valve/Steam’s insistence that the onus is on the developer/publisher to comply with these laws. This is flatly ridiculous. The Tag system should be more than enough to automate the publishing issue on Steam’s end, and scold if companies don’t include appropriate tags. You wouldn’t expect WalMart to import stuff to sell in Russia that violated local laws and then blame the manufacturers of those goods for it. Steam already takes 30%, the onus should lie firmly upon them to curate what they offer in different markets.
Why are so many people ignoring that this was indeed in violation of a contract between Valve and the developer that the latter is expected to read and sign? It’s a boiler-plate liability release so that Valve is not culpable for the actions of non-Valve developers who sell on their platform and Valve would be absolutely out of their gourd to not have people sign on this.
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You are aware, that by that kind of argument, probably every single game on Steam is probably in violation of some vaguely worded blue law somewhere in the world, right?
So, are all those devs in willful violation of their contract with Valve?
It wasn’t too long ago that the idea that an American company kowtowing to Russian censorship would have horrified the lot of you.
Remember that united states?