Steam continues to operate in Russia despite sanctions, allowing Russian players to access and pay for games through workarounds. At the same time, Steam has complied with Russian censorship demands—removing titles or restricting access when ordered by state agencies.
And existing measures are not on Steam, but payment processors. Valve got free rep doing nothing.
On the other hand I imagine profits and playerbase are not why they are still there, but their previous decision to wire up the whole region via russian servers and general refusal to moderate anything at all keeping the company as small as possible.
It’d be hard to keep serving current owners while stopping all new sales, particularly for live products.
It’d be certainly easier to do that than having to move the entire operation to a different country on account of an issue you may or may not be aligned with yout authoritarian government on, though, so… If we’re doing this article in the first place they wouldn’t be at the top of the empathy chain.
Shouldn’t we let all online companies operate in Russia but with crazy jacked up prices and use whatever increased profit margins? If sb wants to buy a game with a local banking company he’ll have to pay up. By removing ourselves from russian commerce we’re making space for them to gain high levels of independence away from the West, and that’s not how we achieved (mostly) peace in Europe
I mean…
And existing measures are not on Steam, but payment processors. Valve got free rep doing nothing.
On the other hand I imagine profits and playerbase are not why they are still there, but their previous decision to wire up the whole region via russian servers and general refusal to moderate anything at all keeping the company as small as possible.
It’d be hard to keep serving current owners while stopping all new sales, particularly for live products.
It’d be certainly easier to do that than having to move the entire operation to a different country on account of an issue you may or may not be aligned with yout authoritarian government on, though, so… If we’re doing this article in the first place they wouldn’t be at the top of the empathy chain.
Shouldn’t we let all online companies operate in Russia but with crazy jacked up prices and use whatever increased profit margins? If sb wants to buy a game with a local banking company he’ll have to pay up. By removing ourselves from russian commerce we’re making space for them to gain high levels of independence away from the West, and that’s not how we achieved (mostly) peace in Europe