Steam

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.

Governmental approval on games is an unbelievably dumb idea. Banning online game markets is not a solution; changing the laws is.

F to all vietnamese brothers & sisters. I wonder if they also banned Epic and the others

That's Sovereignty.

Assuming approval is a strict requirement, a middle ground solution would be an open source, federatable, steam clone, operated locally. Have an approving committee to priorise approving games from local developers, and working on evaluating international games after all local games are dealt with.

That's for sure similarly efficient to gaming industry distributors system, where you need companies with the right connections to launch games in big platforms, like sony's, nintendo's, or microsoft's. Or event steam's, to a minor extent. Which also veto games not aligned to their opaque terms and conditions.

Also, it would improve international competition, with the removal of the technology barrier of entry, distribution costs would lower, games would become cheaper, and the share retained by creators and developers would be increased.

Long live, a collaborative approach to technology! Long live smaller profit margins! Long live open source!

This is only possible because Steam is (1) anti-libre software plus (2) service as a software substitute.

It's hardly banned. Vietnamese people are still playing steam. It's really easy to get around and it's not a crime to use steam in the country.

ITT: reasons why gamers should be rounded up and put into re-education camps.

God damn I just bought a whole data center in Vietnam to VPN to for gaming specifically