as reported in Vietnam.net, it’s possible Steam has been taken down in Vietnam after local game developers complained about the scope and size of Steam’s vast portfolio of games, claiming Vietnamese devs cannot compete with Steam’s releases given they are subject to government approval and thousands of international games on Steam are not.
Citing it as “an injustice to domestic publishers”, Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development “will die” if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games.
As a vietnamese American, my mom always told me stories about the shitty government. Most citizens in Vietnam know the laws are dumb too but can’t protest because the government is too strong now. Just know that EVERYTHING is regulated over there.
Love how people like you have to bring in NATO into everything. As if it has anything to do with Vietnam banning Steam.
Ooof. What a stupid take.
There are indie studios whose lives have been changed because they focus on the international market.
This small brain thinking will ensure they die.
The local devs were not trying to get steam banned. Hell they wanted steam but wanted to play by the same rules and pointed out how strict their own laws and requirements were.
Vietnam govt said you’re right, it’s not fair and banned steam to make sure everyone plays by their rules rather than admit the rules were stupid and draconic.
It’s not immediately obvious to me that indie developers in Vietnam won’t be able to find an international publisher. While I don’t approve of the law, it does strike me as potentially having a positive effect on Vietnamese studios.
Given how it can be circumvented by fiddling with DNS according to the article, I doubt it’ll really do anything besides stoke negative sentiment towards Vietnamese studios. Besides, you can buy plenty of the games elsewhere, so even if it worked, all you’re accomplishing is making it slightly more annoying for gamers to buy what they want, rather than having it in one place.
Governmental approval on games is an unbelievably dumb idea. Banning online game markets is not a solution; changing the laws is.
Capitalist states are also authoritarian. In fact all states are.
Frederick Engels, 1872, On Authority
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
The Vietnamese state itself will tell you that it has not yet reached its end-goal of communism: the absence of social classes and withering away of the state.
F to all vietnamese brothers & sisters. I wonder if they also banned Epic and the others
That’s Sovereignty.
Assuming approval is a strict requirement, a middle ground solution would be an open source, federatable, steam clone, operated locally. Have an approving committee to priorise approving games from local developers, and working on evaluating international games after all local games are dealt with.
That’s for sure similarly efficient to gaming industry distributors system, where you need companies with the right connections to launch games in big platforms, like sony’s, nintendo’s, or microsoft’s. Or event steam’s, to a minor extent. Which also veto games not aligned to their opaque terms and conditions.
Also, it would improve international competition, with the removal of the technology barrier of entry, distribution costs would lower, games would become cheaper, and the share retained by creators and developers would be increased.
Long live, a collaborative approach to technology! Long live smaller profit margins! Long live open source!
How do you even stop distribution of malware though? For a second or two I thought this would be a really cool idea to start working on; but assuming everyone can spin up their own instance there’s nothing that would stop someone with evil intentions to create a fake store that federates with all good storefronts.
Same as torrents, some form of signing keys?
I was thinking federation for the social aspect of it, not the distribution aspect of it.
Distribution would be “the usual”. Stores acquire software, and licenses, store and serve the data through a server. Client software solve installation and integration between games and social stuff, like friends, messages, networking and achievements.
I mean, it’s not a one person project, but if I were supreme leader of Vietnam and had the people and resources to be working on providing video game entertainment for the masses, that’s how I’d be thinking about it. Not that software skills and supreme leader skills have any overlap…
This is only possible because Steam is (1) anti-libre software plus (2) service as a software substitute.
Based.
I hated steam when it started. I’ve grown to realize it’s much better than any alternative. But I still miss the pre-steam days.
I was furious that I had to download steam and install steam to play new vegas on pc at launch (as well as the box I bought from gamestop not having a the game inside but rather just a pamphlet with a cd key) I was later infuriated by New Vegas at launch and the utterly broken state of the game with each week a new but preventing progress or outright crashing game.
But now days I’m reasonable happy with (Steam) it, it’s not a perfect a solution but at least tries to uphold the gamer/consumer experience, unlike shotboxes like origin or epic games which were nonstop ads and snooping through your files outside the directory.