I haven’t played any Sony game on steam, because I am waiting until I can build new PC, hopefully by the end of the year. I was planning to buy them, but not anymore. Instead I will get fit in the gym.
Geoblocking shouldn’t be a thing, unless it’s for a good reason like sanctions. It’s called the Internet (International Network) for a reason. If Coca Cola can operate in nearly every country, why can’t Sony?
I’m pretty sure internet means internetwork, as in between networks. There’s also intranets, which are limited access web networks.
You are right that geoblocking really shouldn’t be a thing, it’s existence is thanks to varying laws and regulations, and most annoyingly, IP distribution contracts.
I’m pretty sure internet means internetwork, as in between networks.
Yes you’re right. I’m one of the operators of network AS559 and we have loads of interconnections to other networks, a supermajority of those is within our small nation. The international ones do make for a lot of traffic though :-)
(Apparently) Sony has been pulling this shit for years, so either no one noticed or there’s more to it. I wonder if perhaps any of these countries have laws restricting certain online services, which Sony doesn’t follow, and thus is not allowed (as opposed to simply choosing not to offer)?
I don’t think they’re that dumb, I can see them making their own launcher with PS+ sub to get free games or something like gamepass, but locking online play behind a paywall on PC sounds too braindead even for them, it’d be an even worse PR suicide attempt than Epic’s exclusivity shenanigans.
I feel like GOG deserves at least some respect. They don’t have a perfect track record, by any means, but I find them at least reliable, decent sales, have gotten some fun freebies out of them in the past.
And, hey, shopping cart. Which shouldn’t be a selling point, I’m fucking flabbergasted that it came to this on any platform, but that’s another point above EPIC.
Valve support has historically been pretty awesome. They even replaced an index controller nearly a year out of warranty. Granted their controllers have a shit switch and they break after a few hundred hours, but good on support for being bros.
That’s basically all corporate entities. They’re not beholden to the workers, the consumers, or the general public and instead answer to people generally trying to milk everything as hard as possible.
Valve wouldn’t exist at it is if it was public and might not exist as it is if it wasn’t for Newell (and I say that as a person that’s very critical of Valve, they’re still very far from how bad they could be considering their position)
Not gonna defend corporations here, but valve isnt public. They are privately owned by the bosses and employees, valve has one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry. It is quite difficult to get a job there for that reason. So they are actually quite beholden to their workers.
It’s not shareholders specifically, but management that doesn’t give a shit about the company long term.
The business has a fiduciary duty to benefit the shareholders, but it doesn’t have to be short term only, or at the cost of long term benefits.
Most publicly traded companies end up with leadership who are only interested in justifying their employment through the next earnings call or making sure the stock price has gone up between when they last got options and when they next vest.
Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.
This is kind of true. But the leadership often answers to the board of directors, which have often been shareholders that buy into control of the company after it goes public. At this point, you have shareholders who own no personal stake in a company. Often their only goal is to make a profit, sometimes they’re “serial entrepreneurs” who make their millions getting on boards and “flipping” the company to make a huge profit in a short amount of time.
So it’s kind of management, but it’s also management brought on by the presence of public investment in a company.
Combine this with the fact that the law has come down more than once on the side of choosing options that make the company money over maintaining company policy and you get a really terrible culture of publicly traded companies gouging themselves for short term profit (or even long term profit done in a shitty way.)
Oh, I realize I repeated some of what you said. But you did say “it’s not about shareholders” to be contrarian, then went on to explain (like I did) how it’s actually exactly because of shareholders.
Edit: what the fuck I literally can’t comment on the comment below.
I wasn’t actually trying to be contrarian, but okay.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t explain how it’s actually shareholders, because the board of directors isn’t “the shareholders”, but leadership of the company.
Valve isn’t publicly traded, but it’s still a corporation with shareholders, a board of directors, and the usual trappings of corporate leadership. They tend to operate in a not shitty way because their leadership isn’t interested in sacrificing greater long term profit for lesser short term profits.
A private, family owned partnership style business can operate with a focus on short term profits over long term profits.
The safest way to ensure that the leadership of both of those businesses out as much money in their pockets as possible is to continuously maximize short term profits. “The shareholders” aren’t the cause for that mindset.
Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.
All of that short-term thinking is because of the stock market. All of their shareholders think of, day in and day out, is “line go up”.
Well, I’ll disagree a bit there. The largest stock investors are institutional investors managing funds on behalf of retirement plans. Those investors tend to prefer consistent long term growth over a narrow quarterly growth target, and will actually look at things beyond just stock price, like strategy and long term market prospects.
Short term thinking from the leadership team is them not having a good idea on how to provide the long term strategy that investors prefer, and instead hoping to appeal to the smaller group of investors who do only care about short term growth so they can secure their own payoff, potentially at the expense of the long term prospects of the company.
Valve is a corporation. They have shareholders other than Gabe, many of whom are not employed at valve of in their leadership team. Their leadership team isn’t looking to ensure that their paycheck comes in over the future of the company, so they make good choices.
Compare with companies like Coca-Cola, which are publicly traded but have that long term plan that lets them openly talk about sacrificing revenue to pursue product plans and market growth that leads to more stable long term profits.
The largest stock investors are institutional investors managing funds on behalf of retirement plans. Those investors tend to prefer consistent long term growth over a narrow quarterly growth target, and will actually look at things beyond just stock price, like strategy and long term market prospects.
Based on what evidence? They just make sure the line steadily goes up each quarter, instead of accounting for companies that invest potential profits into longer-term plans. If not, the 401K investor will either drop the stock, or put it in a higher-risk plan.
That sort of thinking is akin to corporate suicide when in a publicly-traded market, so they don’t do it.
A company like Valve isn’t publicly-traded, and they have a limited number of investors they can talk to about their plans. That and they have a reputation of quality products, so even the investors are going to put up with short-term drops in profitability for even more profits.
Didn’t you know? it’s good when US bans/sanctions foreign companies, when other countries does it, it’s AUTHORITARIAN. And companies in US are totally not in bed with the government.
Everyone else must run spyware “Made in the USA” or else you’re causing some irreparable harm of sorts.
Don’t some games in steam run Anticheat as rootkits? That’s totally okay, because it’s from the great USA.
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.
Edit: I think I remember what I wrote, and I’m pretty sure it landed me a 5 day account ban. Though I feel that that was a touch heavy handed, and unnecessary.
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.
One has to wonder what they would have had if it had gone the other way… would they look more like the Philippines, perhaps, or Indonesia? A “strong man” in Saigon with CIA backing on steroids. Because a whole other kind of just as shitty is still just as shitty.
I think you’re misunderstanding what I said, US fought a war to stop it the spread of Lenin/Stalin styled authoritarian communism and failed. There never really was a chance for a proper democracy to rise up in such an improverished nation when both sides were going to exploit the hell out of poor workers without adding any significant value to the country or help prop up self sufficient industries.
That’s what Americans claim to save face. I’m a Vietnamese American and Asian history tends to suck in other nations. America used that narrative to justify invading another country and then dipping out when it was too hard.
I’m still going to overgeneralize, but here’s the actual history they don’t teach you. (History is much more interesting outside of school).
From the Vietnamese perspective, they initially didn’t want/need American help, but about HALF of Vietnam didn’t want communism. Similar to Korea, it was kinda like North vs South. America knew that Vietnam has potential to be another booming nation so they saw an opportunity to “help” Vietnam for profit and claim they’re fighting communism in the process. America doesn’t just “help” for the sake of good, we’re a nation of profit and greed.
During this war, South Korea’s involvement and then eventual American alliance actually helped South Korea flourish from all this new money they were getting. When Nixon saw that Vietnam was a losing war, he pussied out and ended up moving on to help Korea since that was the next “profitable” nation; even helping in “fighting communism” during the Korean War. Vietnam took a huge L after Nixon pumped and pulled resources so he partially caused the loss, too. Looking back now, America made the “right” call on South Korea as it’s now both rich AND has good US relations.
Most of the Vietnamese population today prefers a less communistic government but not much can be done. Government is just stupid powerful BECAUSE of communism in the first place. Like some long domino effect.
TL:Dr America is a sneaky country and does things that only benefit them. They couldn’t benefit from Vietnam so they moved onto Korea in “I’m done playing with you” style.
Geographically it was half the country, but population wise it was closer to 2/3rd pro communist vs 1/3rd anti communist. US involvement wasn’t really justified to start and mostly sunk cost fallacy with how they tried to support the French rule before France pulled out and US was holding the bag and a doctrinal choice of stopping the spread of communism even when there was little to nothing to gain and only save face. Vietnam was going to have a civil war no matter what but US definitely made it worse and drew out the conflict and ramped up the death toll with nothing to show for it. If the US had any intentions of taking advantage of Vietnam modernising and industrializing they’d have setup southern cities that were more friendly to US investments with trafe and infrastructure. But just like in Korea that wouldn’t happen for decades later, US presence there was entirely military and some very bare bones humanitarian aid.
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.
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.
The diseased western individualist leech mindset has invaded too many people for it to not exist in large groups (fediverse instances). Anglos act like one hivemind as far as some core ideas go, and they will push it at all costs. The white man’s burden is shouldered by men, women and minorities of Anglosphere alike. Fediverse overlaps with western diaspora, so it is easy to come across these specimens.
Love how people like you instantly come to NATO’s rescue, when Vietnam banning Steam should not ruffle the jimmies of westoids. Turns out, “government scrutiny” is bad when Vietnam wants to protect its native game developers, according to some people here. It is okay if Steam digests them.
What exactly do you think did “government scrutiny” mean by the above poster, an idea you seem to defend? It is meant to refer to the communist Vietnam government as authoritarian, because they refuse to let USA’s Steam destroy the indie game dev scene. NATO has everything to do with every single prominent USA or Europe based service or platform, which includes Steam. Steam spies on DNS cache of users for some mysterious reason too.
What exactly do you think USA/NATO has not to do with Steam and colonising the game dev scenes around the world? It accomplishes western imperialist proxy colonisation.
So if I publish a game on steam I am now a colonizer? If I am a Vietnamese citizen who downloads a game that hasn’t gone through “government scrutiny” am I now a collaborator? What if I am a Vietnamese game developer that has published directly to steam without giving a shit about whatever censorship my government is trying to implement? Should I be sent to reeducation?
Yep, this is the mindset I was trying to describe. Thanks for making my point clear. I have seen you around too much with your anti-communist politics, so I can see through your arguments, like this one where you describe Vietnamese government in a particular manner just because they decided to protect their country’s game developers.
When he said “government scrutiny”. He openly desires the laissez faire market nonsense to allow an opening for west to do what it always has. Vietnam has a far larger market outside of west in Asia, Africa, Russia and South Americas.
Ah yes, everyone else fault. Not that you come in here with the dumbest claim, refuse to explain it, and then just try to shit on everyone calling you out on your idiocy.
Tell me what the “government scrutiny” is then! I have no idea except that Vietnamese game developers find it onerous. It’s a video game, how much scrutiny does it need?
If NATO countries benefit from laissez faire market crap, it kinda does. Vietnam must have thought quite well about the loss of western market, when protecting its game developers. Vietnam is not a country that hates globalisation, but it will take whatever necessary steps for protection.
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