Steam is now banned in Vietnam

Hal-5700X@sh.itjust.works to Games@lemmy.world – 249 points –
Steam is now banned in Vietnam
eurogamer.net
17

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...

Yeah! It's so unfair that one person can put their heart and soul into making a game on their own, self publish, and be successful! No way anyone else could possibly do that!

This all just sounds like the publisher or MBAs speaking. Did they ask the actual developers on their opinions?

Also, it seems like the ISPs were the ones that blocked access. No word from the government yet. Kinda weird to call this a "ban".

As far as i know, only the Steam Store domain is blocked by ISP's DNS. So changing to Google DNS would easily bypass it.

I'm taking this off of my list of places to move if I ever fake my death.

If you faked your death you'd likely never want to tie yourself to any platform that requires you to make an account that could in time be used to identify you

You don't have a separate 100% anonymous steam account to use in case of having to fake your death? Your loss tbh...

Why buy one steam library when you can buy two for twice the price?

What if it's tied to your new identity? But idk, starting your whole library over from scratch... Better hope that insurance payout is nice.

This was about a week ago, since then it was unblocked, then reblocked. Note, this is only the store itself (and the store within Steam), you can still play your existing games, so it seems they have blocked the store front to hamstring or reduce sales so that Valve will then pay whatever tax amount is going to be asked for.