Gaming IndustrySteam has taken down ‘over 260 materials containing illegal content’ from its Russian store, brags the country’s media censorship agencyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustrySteam has taken down ‘over 260 materials containing illegal content’ from its Russian store, brags the country’s media censorship agencyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: ALEXEY DRUZHININ/RIA NOVOSTI/AFP via Getty Images)
Russian media agencyInterfax(viaThe Moscow Times) reports that Steam has complied with a request from Roskomnadzor—Russia’s media regulator—to remove “all materials forbidden in the Russian Federation.”
Steam has, says The Moscow Times, around 9.5 million users in Russia (and all of them have gotten angry at me in Counter-Strike). No doubt the Russian state’s rapidly growing interest in clamping down on western tech and developing its own national “digital sovereignty” has led it to pay close attention to the US-headquartered service.
“Steam has complied with the law’s demands regarding the removal of prohibited information,” Roskomnadzor told Russian media. “Links to 11 internet pages, included earlier on the Registry[of prohibited information] will be excluded from it” over last week. In total, says the regulator, Steam has removed “over 260 materials containing illegal content” in Russia.
The question is, of course, what materials were those? Both Roskomnadzor and Valve have kept schtum about it, the former only referring to them as generic “forbidden materials” and Valve saying, well, nothing at all. I’ve reached out to both Valve and Roskomnadzor to ask for more information about the blocked materials and the form Roskomnadzor’s request to remove them took, and whether Steam could have resisted the request, and I’ll update this piece if I hear back.
The general tenor of theregistry of prohibited sitescan give us some insight into the kinds of things that were probably banned, though. Generally, the registry forbids anything that bucks against the Russian government’s ultra-conservative social values (so information on drugs or queer lifestyles, for instance) but is also used spuriously to justify shutting down methods of communication that the government can’t keep a close handle on, as in the case of last week’sDiscord ban.
This isn’t the only Russia/Steam story that’s hit our pages this year. In March, we covered Putin’s quixotic instruction to the government to look into creatingits ownSteam. And Steam Deck. And SteamOS. Digital sovereignty, after all, extends to videogames too.
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