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.

Filed Under: bigotry, russia, steam

Companies: valve