I’m not defending Valve here they need to have more values, but realistically this game was never going to be available for sale in Russia. No matter what they did.
I strongly disagree, the Workers & Resource DLC link can provide some insights on this; russian language reviews talk about “getting salo for the Ukrainians” and whataboutism about Palestine (like they care about Palestine, if anything most russians tend to support Israel). There is lots of anti-Ukrainian, pro-invasion russian language commentary on Steam.
We’ve lived in russia as an expat family for many years, we left as soon as our finances allowed us to (this was was before the russians invaded Georgia in 2008).
Then there is broader research on russian support for the full scale invasion; even using demographic splits (e.g. people aged 18 to 24, highly educated russians, high income russians), all demographic segments show at least majority support for the full scale invasion (with almost all segment groups showing at strong majority support and very commonly overwhelming majority support).
With respect to arguments that “people are afraid to show their true views”; there are multiple research pieces that specifically account for preference falsification. Some russians do hide their preferences, but this group is so small that even with preference falsification adjustments you have a strong majority support (65%+) for the full scale invasion. That’s specifically the full scale invasion (i.e. 2022), with respect to the annexation of Crimea, preference falsification was found to be not statistically significant with the respect to the baseline ~85% support for the annexation of Crimea.
The level of support for the Russian armed forces has not changed significantly since the beginning of the conflict – the majority of respondents (76%) support the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine, including 48% “definitely support” and another 28% “rather support” the action of Russian army. 16% are against.
Research with preference falsification adjustments with respect to support for the full scale invasion:
The vast majority of Russians (86%) consistently support the accession of Crimea to Russia – this indicator has fluctuated slightly since 2014. 9% do not support the accession.
Research with preference falsification adjustments with respect to support for annexation of Crimea:
Using the list-experiment technique, Timothy Frye and others showed that Putin's approval rating after the annexation of Crimea was actually high, at around 80%. In their study, they made a list of famous Russian politicians and had respondents answer how many of these politicians they supported. They then estimated Putin's approval rating by adding the name "Putin" to the list for only one group[*]3 and thus concluded that the high approval ratings after the annexation of Crimea were not very different from the findings of opinion pollsters.
A high level overview of russian support for the invasion of Ukraine (a summary, but with links to relevant research, albeit some sources will be in russian):
Younger people still support the war in high numbers, though their support is lower than that of the older generation: 75–80 percent of people fifty-five and older support the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine, while 61 percent of young respondents in Levada polls share this sentiment.
Steam always chose the path of least resistance when it comes to dealing with law maker demands even when there were more consumer friendly ways available. This is not surprising at all.
They started their business in there a while ago (I believe they were the first online distributor who managed to succeed in the Russian market, despite media fears of mass piracy), and I would imagine that revoking all of the users’ Steam Libraries wouldn’t be a popular move, or terminating all their accounts.
I’m not sure why they continued purchases after 2022 though. Maybe their Eastern Europe payment processor doesn’t ask too many questions?
I did back in 2015 when I was an edgy idiot, upset about their removal of the game Hatred because it is literally a spree shooting simulator. And I was all like “free speech”. And Gabe actually replied! And put the game back up too.
I don’t really know why they feel they need to Cave to Russian pressure here. They have all the cards. Russia will never ever stop Steam from running in Russia. If they try to cut off Counter-Strike the entire country would collapse immediately. I’m 100% serious that is not sarcasm at all.
How and why do they even access Steam? The Internet and Computers aren‘t „traditional ways“ of communicating and video games are not „traditional ways“ of entertainment. Do they reject modern medicine too for being „non-traditional“? Seriously out of all the anti progress bullshit, this is the dumbest aspect.
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