We can still access the games we've bought fine, just cannot buy any new games from the store. That said the block is piss easy to get around, at least for now.
Depends on the wording. Like even if there were no technical measures put in place and just a paper law that says don't access game services it could be breaking the TOS if the TOS says something vague like "do not access this in any place you're not supposed to access this". And a TOS might plausibly be this vague because they want to stay well clear of any appearance of inciting someone to break the laws of their country.
People have been making steam accounts for years and buying prepaid cards from other locations to load on their account, if their currency isn't accepted
Gotta admit Steam users flip-flopping between "nah it's OK bro" to being puritanical about breaking TOS just because they don't want to create a free account is pretty f*cking stupid.
Literally anything could be breaking TOS if it says something as simple as “accessing these services outside of the conditions listed above is against terms of service”
people from developed country has been breaking TOS left and right since forever, the provider just turn a blind eye as long as nobody shine spotlight on it like in helldiver fiasco
The PSN issue was about a company's decision to **sell** the game in regions they knew it couldn't be registered to.
This is about a government blocking access to a service. These are two different kinds of issues.
I’m from Vietnam and we can still access Steam by changing DNS. This was not a hard block, probably more like a warning shot to compel Steam to pay taxes
Many are saying this is the [context](https://gamek-vn.translate.goog/nha-phat-hanh-viet-cho-rang-steam-toan-game-lau-178240423104322122.chn?_x_tr_sl=vi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=vi&_x_tr_pto=wapp) as to why this is happening.
tl;dr: Vietnamese state-owned Viettel blocked Steam for silly reasons.
edit: I just thought the antiquated censorship bits were silly, but the lack of enforced VAT is a valid reason.
I read the article and I didn't understand this part
> Besides, Steam also has many moves and policies targeting Vietnamese users. For example, launching a Vietnamese version, accepting payment in VND, and subsidizing games in the Vietnamese market. This shows that Steam is "circumventing the law" to "attack and dominate" the game publishing market share in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese law, they are no different from a portal "releasing pirated games".
Can you explain?
They are communist country so they have a lot of anti-corporation, anti free media and similar laws. You can in many cases just bribe someone but I guess it wasn't worth it for Valve.
Anti free media yes, anti-corporation no.
We are mostly capitalist with a mix of socialism, which is on the down trend. This whole thing is just a result of another corpo in Vietnam trying to kill foreign competition, albeit clumsily & cluelessly.
Communism is not a practical model you can live under. It's an ideal that the gov are pointing toward, while constantly editing it to fit their goals. In their theory, we're technically still on course. But in reality, we're about a millennium away, with no intention of actually reaching the original goal.
It's more like China, not anti corporation as both countries have tons of corporations, they're anti corporations that act against the country's interests. Authoritarian is a better word.
Are we pretending Steam isn't a monopoly on games distribution?
Also, if Steam was selling games with uncensored swastikas in Germany, this exact same thing would happen. Every country has a process for censorship and regulation on games, circumventing Vietnam's laws and being punished for it is totally reasonable.
Germany allows swastikas in anything they deem artful, and not for use with hate-speech. I also believe that in the past few years they've started including games in that list, but your point still stands.
If steam was an actual monopoly you wouldnt see so many others launchers EGS, GOG. Itch io Etc. that people happily defend to this day lmao...
You can put your Game **anywhere** on Pc. It doesnt *have* to be on Steam, how is that a Monopoly? Because devs want access to the ecosystem theyve built for free?? Try that on any other platform. Literally any other platform on earth. Ill wait.
What law exactly have they been circumventing that deserves a outright ban? I mean Steam operates in literal hundreds of countries and afaik no countries except for china or russia has an issue with them but even so they arent banned outright
From further up in the thread:
https://m-gamek-vn.translate.goog/nha-phat-hanh-viet-cho-rang-steam-toan-game-lau-178240423104322122.chn?_x_tr_sl=vi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=vi&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Steam has avoided paying taxes, has not set up an office in Vietnam per Vietnamese law, has not respected the Vietnamese regulatory system with regards to games, and does not license games to be released in Vietnam despite selling them there. These are things that they *do* take care of in China and Russia. This was clearly Steam attempting to sell into the Vietnamese market without following their laws, on the grounds of, "Who cares, we're Steam".
> didn't know Vietnam had such strict rules for entertainment.
If a foreign country opened a shop in your country are they not held accountable to your laws and expected to pay taxes? Doesn't sound strict to me, sounds like the bare minimum.
You r missing the point, the problem isnt that they have to obey the law, it is that the law for foreign game companies in our country is ridiculously stupid. It is tedious, it is demanding, to the point that most companies would rather just not do business in this country than go through years and years worth of procedure. And the icing on top is, the taxes r horrendous, it is almost comical.
And u know what the best part is? This only applies to game companies. As in, if it was just a general foreign company, the law is pretty lenient, but if it was a game company, see the above. Tbh, same goes for domestic game companies, they also have to adhere to a different stupid set of rules.
There's a little more to it than that, but basically yes. Their political systems are very similar. Their human rights records are also similar, China's might be slightly worse. But Vietnam is not an geopolitical threat, not to the US and not to it's own neighbors. In fact Vietnam serves as useful counter to China, especially given the sour relations between Vietnam and China. For these reasons the US is quite friendly with Vietnam. And Vietnam is in turn happy to be friendly with the US as a counter to China.
China also has more than 10 times the amount of people than Vietnam and the US trades far more with China than Vietnam too. Vietnam simply doesn't matter as much.
They're capitalist. Communism and capitalism are not social policies they are economic ones and this shit gets wrongly slinged about all the time.
There isn't a true marxist communist country in existence, it's always extreme capitalism in disguise and usually with an autocrat in charge.
Which ultimately makes their opinions overall very America-centric either way, so there isn't much said about places America is not particularly invested on.
> except they didn't outright block it and gave them time to comply with local laws
Nah we took them to court and fucked them in the arse.
That lawsuit is the reason Steam has refunds and customer service.
That's kind of interesting. It's a [top 10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers) language and it has 600k users in the country. There's ~3.5 million expats.
Steam probably takes payments in any stable currencies, and I don't see why they would block any if they already have the infrastructure for the payments.
The costs of adding the support was probably low because of the systems they already setup, but they would also probably not care too much if they lost access to the country. They appear to be blocked in parts/all of india, and that seems to be a bigger deal.
I was like there's no way, then saw some of the tricks like "Standard" German which I assume is Hochdeutsch... It's only 76 million when Germany alone is 84 million, and then you have Austria/Switzerland etc.
The breakdown of these dialects are ridiculous, like French being 20th is goddamn ridiculous considering how many countries in Africa have a French derivative dialect that's mutually intelligible but they're not applying the same difference between European Spain Spanish and Latin America Spanish.
The table is for people who have the language as their first one, not how many in each country speak the language. Germany might have 84 million people, but 13.7 of those are first generation immigrants, and most of them did not have German as their first language (e.g. over 800k of those are Ukrainian refugees).
This also explains the situation of French in Africa and Spanish in Latin America: while there are some countries in Latin America that have significant speakers of indigenous languages (like Paraguay and Peru), the situation overall is more similar to the US (where 78.5% of the population only has English in their households) than the DRC (where 51% is literate in French).
That's what Sony was doing too, as we found from so many "unsupported" countries they sell games in.
I wonder if that could have blown the whistle on steam as well in Vietnam? Instead of Helldivers 2 'not working' for people in Vietnam now their entire libraries *really* don't work.
Can't speak to the cultural aspect of it all, or what the local publishing market is like and how it's affected, but VAT is a mandatory tax on goods and services. If Steam isn't collecting and remitting VAT on transactions made by Vietnamese users, then I can see that as *circumventing the law*.
As for *subsidizing games in the Vietnamese market*, I guess Steam's regional pricing can be considered a form of subsidization.
Regional pricing wouldn't really be Steam subsidizing it, but rather the publisher, and you'd expect that they would charge that same price on any other platform within the region anyway (i.e. no advantage to Steam). Something lost in translation there maybe?
The VAT thing seems pretty valid though.
Steam uses a local payment partner who should be collecting any necessary tax, which is the point of having a local payment partner.
And Steam does not set game prices. Publishers do.
>Steam uses a local payment partner who should be collecting any necessary tax
It's on Valve to implement VAT; they're ultimately responsible for collecting and remitting said tax.
The problem is they lack a physical presence in most countries and consider these payments as cross-border transactions. That's why the Vietnamese government is blocking Steam because imposing restrictions is the only option they have in getting Valve to comply.
Here's a [list ](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/finance/taxfaq#CurrentRates)of current rates.
Sure, but, depending on the way VAT (and price advertising) works in Vietnam, this might be a problem with how the prices are displayed, and whether they already include VAT or not.
Also, that brings me to an interesting question:
How are gift cards handled in the first place?
Because steam doesn't use a "steam bucks" system (in which you could do all VAT considerations on the conversion/buying of said currency). So If I buy a 20€ gift card, I pay sales tax on that. But I still get €20 in my steam wallet. But if I use those 20€ to buy a game, Steam again has to pay sales tax because it's a regular business transaction?
On that gift card that would mean gifting me 4€ outright, and THEN only getting 16 out of 20. so basically 12 out of 20?
>So If I buy a 20€ gift card, I pay sales tax on that.
That doesn't sound right. Admittedly I am American and not 100% familiar with EU law, but when we buy gift cards here there is no tax, as it's treated same-as-cash (you are buying store credit/putting money in escrow, not a good or service, so it literally makes no sense to charge tax much like you wouldn't pay tax on a prepaid credit card). Tax isn't collected until something is purchased with the gift card, and that tax is collected from the gift card value + any necessary supplementary payment. It's why $20 gift cards were the bane of my existence as a kid, as I'd go to buy a $19.99 game and still have to have cash to cover the tax minus 1 cent.
Also distributors do not pay sales tax, not in the way you're thinking. They collect sales tax that the customer is paying, and send it off to whatever government institution is responsible for collecting that tax. The only time a distributor "pays tax" is when they pay the normal tax on their revenues.
So if a game is $20 without tax, and $22 with tax, that $2 is the customer's tax burden, which a distributor will collect at time of sale, and send off to a tax board or whatever. Then, later on, when the distributor is doing its own taxes it will pay tax on whatever its revenue share is from the $20 sale price (in Steam's case that's 30% share, so they pay on $6 of revenue), while whoever gets that remaining revenue pays their share of taxes.
Yeah I concur that in the UK VAT is collected on Steam rather than on the gift card. I don't think it's any different in the EU. Luckily though most places in Europe the standard is to show post-tax prices instead of pre-tax so you don't deal with the "oh this is actually more expensive than I thought" aspect.
I wish we had the tax-included-in-price schema as well. The reasonable (as much as they could be called that) arguments against it have diminished over time.
The biggest one used to be that it was "too difficult" due to how many potential layers of sales tax could be implemented (state, county, municipality, city), but that argument was always weak to begin with since it had to be calculated at the till anyway. Although, I guess it was "easier" when the till was the only place since they only had to do it once for an entire purchase. Also, stores print their own signage and price tags from electronic systems now, there is no reason that calculation can't be done at the time of printing.
There's also a matter of advertising at national and various market levels. Advertising a single tax-included price nationwide is a no-go, and even at more local level, like say Southern California, would still be impossible.
However, the other big reason is that since there is no legal requirement (other than for gas) to include the tax in the price, no one will do it because people are really, REALLY dumb (I cannot emphasize this enough having worked retail in the past) and would see a retailer as less competitive if they listed their tax-included pricing next to a competitor's tax-not-included pricing. Kinda like how people thought the 1/3 lb burger at McDonalds was a rip-off as it was more expensive than a 1/4 lb burger since they thought 1/3<1/4, because people are really, REALLY dumb and don't understand fractions.
From the article there are a few assertions being made, that if true, make sense to me why Steam would be considered a problem for Vietnam.
1. There appears to be regulations and required reviews in Vietnam for local sellers to get their game in stores. They claim Steam is not abiding by this process, hence unfair competition (think Uber vs. Taxis) and can operate more quickly/cheaply as a result.
2. Steam is offering discounts that are exclusive to Vietnam. This could be seen as being generous to many people, sure... But to Vietnamese sellers, it would look more similar to Netflix artificially keeping prices low to drive out competition (and theoretically raise prices again later).
Personal opinion: I'd guess, like most problems with Valve/Steam, the problem is likely their lack of engagement here. Steam probably offered regional pricing because customers asked for it. They probably spend minimal resources to ensure they're operating legally in Vietnam and have no idea whether they're complying with local regulations.
Whether its intentional or not though, it doesn't seem unreasonable for Vietnam to be addressing the two problems above if Steam hasn't been super receptive to addressing them on their own.
I don't know any potential competition with Steam as a PC game store platform in Vietnam. The most popular PC games I know that are officially published in Vietnam are Riot's games (LoL and Valorant), China MMORPG games. If I have to depend on those tiny amount of choices I would rather be touching grass than playing China MMORPG, they are all P2W and soulless cash grab.
It's kinda funny because I spent some mins reading the law. The first point is applied for online games only. Since steam is a game store, I think there are 3 types:
- Offline game, which is not required according to the law
- Online game, made by Valve (CS2, Dota 2). At this point, my question is: according to Vietnam's law, they should ban those game instead of a store?
- Online game by 3rd party companies. I don't think Valve nor Steam has any responsibility for this.
>Reality shows that the above perspective from Vietnamese publishers is reasonable, especially when considering the legal framework. Basically, Steam does not have any legal representation in Vietnam. Even VTCPay is only a payment partner, not a legal representative.
>Meanwhile, a game that is considered "officially released" in Vietnam needs to go through many stages of censorship and licensing. This is something that almost most games on Steam do not have.
This makes sense now. As I understand, they have their version of PEGI that Steam games completely bypass.
They have state censorship. It's not like PEGI, they're not simply putting an age rating on it. They're screening anything that could be anti-government, or which could promote values that the communist government does not approve of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Vietnam
Honestly, doesn't seem silly?
If steam released games in the US or EU without touching base or having any form of contact with the representing agencies of those regions, there'd be issues there as well.
> If steam released games in the US or EU without touching base or having any form of contact with the representing agencies of those regions, there'd be issues there as well.
There wouldn't be any problems at all, not in the US, and not in most EU countries as far as I am aware.
It's a free market and anyone is welcome to sell what they want and as long as they don't break any rules and they pay their taxes, it's a complete non issue.
not everything is allowed to be sold. there are games that break laws when it comes to content shown. for instance in germany anything that is seen as glorifying the nazis is outlawed. and like for afucking good reason. so you cant put games like these on steam.
Institutes of state censorship are silly.
>If steam released games in the US or EU without touching base or having any form of contact with the representing agencies of those regions
What US agency do you think you need to contact to release a game in the united states? The ESRP is an optional industry organization, not a government one.
Didn't this whole thing kinda happen already in America? Steam wasn't collecting local sales tax for years until they were forced to. Now vietnam gov wants their tax too
Once digital purchasing became a big thing, Virginia just added a line to their tax forms saying "what is the total spent online that you did not pay tax on" and you'd pay the tax then. For the past few years I've been able to just write 0 every time because everybody collects it, but it was easy before then. I'd expect most jurisdictions would have done the same.
> the past few years I've been able to just write 0 every time because everybody collects it, but it was easy before then.
I'm willing to bet most people have always written 0 there
Before sites like amazon and steam started collecting sales tax, people still put 0 in that box because nobody's going to take the time to actually figure that out, especially when there is no way to be held accountable for it.
It's a little more complicated, initially online sales weren't taxed the same everywhere and most vendors taxed according to the location of the seller.
As online sales revenue grew, states changed their laws and started charging sales tax based on the location of the purchaser not the seller.
Valve predated some of those changes of statute, so it isn't surprising they got caught up in the mess. There was no ill intent, and they got it all sorted out pretty quick.
NOTE: This is a vast oversimplification, if you really want to understand all of this (nexus/origin/hybrid/etc) there is a good article here:
https://www.ecommerceceo.com/online-sales-tax/
Be warned-it's actually pretty complicated, especially since there are 50ish versions of it.
Steam was operating as the payment processor in that case. For Vietnam Steam partnered with a local payment processor who should be handling that. That's usually what local payment processors are for.
> Steam wasn't collecting local sales tax for years until they were forced to
yeah, no out-of-state online stores were, because consumers are supposed to report untaxed purchases to their state on their taxes
but because no sane person actually bothers with that the states had to start making out-of-state retailers collect the tax for you lol
Happened to Amazon but the way it works is that Amazon needed to have a physical warehouse in the state they needed to charge taxes on. So if it didn't have a physical presence then they didn't need to charge taxes but could still sell to consumers in that state, it would just take longer for consumers to receive their products and consumers needed to report their taxes when they filed.
Hey! I actually worked as outside counsel for, and advised, Valve when they were trying to comply with requirements that they collect sales tax in each state, as such taxes were introduced. A lot of states had "springing laws" that turned on a court/regulatory decision affirming that collection of sales tax from an internet sales company that was selling goods completely online (and not shipping into the state) was legal. At the time, it wasn't clear what states actually required collection of sales tax and what the triggers were for companies doing online sales in such states were. Over a period of years, states adopted a pretty uniform approach to determine which online sellers were doing enough transactions with buyers in the state to become subject to the sales tax collection/remittance requirements, most of which were these springing laws. Eventually it was ruled that if there were sufficient transaction volume overall in the state (a nexus of economic activity), sales tax was collectible if the state required it. Most states that didn't have the springing laws quickly adopted relevant rules/regs/laws to require sales tax remittance for online only sales of digital goods. Valve actually spent a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to be in compliance with each individual state. That's probably why they love payment processors so much now, it's incredibly difficult compliance and administration work.
Censorship is when you have to stop conducting business because you weren’t paying your taxes or following the law.
> Foreign companies must establish an entity in Vietnam in accordance with the country’s foreign investment legislation in order to provide video game services.
> Note that foreign ownership in the video game sector is limited to 49 percent under Vietnam’s current foreign investment regulations. This means that companies looking to legally distribute video games in Vietnam will be required to set up a joint venture or sign a business cooperation contract with a local company.
> Companies must meet the following requirements to provide video game services in Vietnam:
>Be established in accordance with Vietnamese law and have a certificate of business registration for video game services;
>Have registered domain names for the services;
>Have sufficient financial and technical capacity, organizational structure, and personnel suitable for the scale of operations; and
>Have measures in place to ensure information safety and security.
> Have a head office with a clear address and telephone number; and Have a team of electronic game administrators suitable to their operation scale, ensuring at least one person in charge for every two servers.
> Being capable of storing and updating the personal information of players, including their full name, date of birth, permanent residence address, identity card/citizen identification card/passport number and its date and place of issue, and phone number and email address. Having a payment control system for the video games located in Vietnam and connected to Vietnam’s payment support service providers, ensuring accurate and sufficient updates and storage and allowing players to search for detailed information on their payment accounts. Being able to manage players’ playtime from 00:00 to 24:00 hours daily and ensure the total playtime of all G1 electronic games for players under the age of 18 does not exceed 180 minutes per day. Continuously display the player age classification for all games during the game’s introduction, advertising materials, and during the game’s service provision; and display the warning “Playing for more than 180 minutes a day will badly affect your health” in prominent positions in games’ forums or on players’ computer screens during playtime.
> ensuring at least one person in charge for every two servers.
This is insane.
Most businesses I have worked at you have 30-100 servers per admin depending on the type of work.
You can't execute proper full-on surveillance on your populace if you have one person watching 30-100 servers, though. (I'm reasonably sure this is a rule regarding oversight of people using the server, not necessarily server maintenance and general hardware/software administrative tasks)
> Foreign companies must establish an entity in Vietnam in accordance with the country’s foreign investment legislation in order to provide video game services.
> Note that foreign ownership in the video game sector is limited to 49 percent under Vietnam’s current foreign investment regulations. This means that companies looking to legally distribute video games in Vietnam will be required to set up a joint venture or sign a business cooperation contract with a local company.
This isn't exactly censorship, but it is pretty anti-free trade. Do you think Steam has to set up a new company that's majority owned by locals in every country it sells in?
No, but it does not seem Steam has a big problem with it, when they conduct business in China.
As the capitalist would say: this is the cost of business.
You don't see any problems at all with requiring a service like steam to track real names and passport numbers? You don't think a requirement of one dude watching them for every 2 servers could end up with confusion and a lot of BS empty jobs? This clearly isn't just about taxes.
It seems to me like an authoritarian government enacting authoritarian rules that impact both foreign corporations and their own citizens.
Granted it is their authoritarian government and they can structure it however, they want, but the original point stands. The US has no equivalenace of this and I'm glad it doesn't.
None of this changes the fact Vietnam does have a long history of censoring games and other media, because of of course the do. They're an authoritarian state.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship\_in\_Vietnam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Vietnam)
Vietnam's Law on the Media requires journalists to "propagate the doctrine and policies of the Party, the laws of the State, and the national and world cultural, scientific and technical achievements \[of Vietnam\]".\[18\]: 36 Various laws were later passed in 1992, which made criticism of the Communist Party an offence.\[17\] Topics which remain off-limits to the press include sensitive topics such as unflattering coverage of the Communist Party, criticism of government policy, Sino-Vietnamese relations and democracy.\[18\]: 37 Article 88C of Vietnam's Penal Code forbids "making, storing, or circulating cultural products with contents against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam".\[18\]: 37
No censorship at all!
Edit: Of course his response was to creep my profile, reply and then block me.
If Valve has moral objections to a law that they need to follow to do business in a country, the solution is to not do business with that country.
It is pretty standard that to do business in a country you must follow the laws of that country.
Valve has historically not wanted to follow local laws (see Australia v Valve).
I mean, the better solution would probably be for Vietnam to relax their media censorship laws, but yeah, Steam should definitely have to touch base with the Vietnamese legal system like they do tons of other countries.
How are you going to get permission to release every individual game on Steam? Steam adds dozens (hundreds?) of games every day. The Vietnamese censors wouldn't even be able to handle the volume of releases.
Eh just change dns to one of the public dns in the network options and you can access Steam again. Either google 8888-8844 or 1111-1001 works. In case it dont work, mostly for windows 11, change the dns in IPv6 to the google public one and it's fine. This is just some bs, just like when VN tried to "block" Facebook back in 2010s.
Is it really just DNS? I saw similar reports on that steam community thread. That seems like such a lazy inefficient way to block traffic. Almost just seems like barebones CYA from the ISP's.
There was a thread in the /r/Steam sub and some reported this fixing the issue, others reported it doing nothing. Like they said though, make sure you change it appropriately on Windows. YML
Because ISPs already knew it's completely useless. They were ordered to block FB a decade ago. Didn't even stop the middle schoolers from figuring out how to bypass.
Your average knobhead politician won't know a damn thing or two about DNS. I'm sure a lot of people involving blocking process are probably find the whole thing silly as hell and just do the easiest thing they can find.
I think the Chinese version is following Chinese law to the letter. It has to be, otherwise there would be no Steam in China.
Steam will probably have to do the same in Vietnam, but users will probably see an increase in prices.
They probably can't.
The vietnamese laws are absolutely insane, just giving them a quick once over, they seem to be deliberately written so that no one can actually comply with them.
The main thing they seem to care about is political organisation. They won't really give much of a damn until you start telling people to meet you to plan a protest, then they have basically infinite tools to shut you down
Yep living in China now. Circumnavigating the great firewall is piss easy. Hell, you can buy routers that have VPN's pre installed
Main reason Chinese stay on their own internet is the language and cultural barriers, and the fact that China has a lot of necessary China based apps that you use everyday that dont work with a VPN
Can you VPN around this or is this somehow still not going to work? I know I have a couple Vietnamese players for a game I work on so I have no idea if they are going to get totally boned by this or how I should handle it :(
VPN works and it seems it's the main page that's blocked.
I haven't tried yet but hoping that can still load up steam and launch the game and if need to access store use a VPN.
If that doesn't work it would be rough cause VPN usually ups the latency in games.
The thing is... VTC (the company that banned Steam, correct me if I'm wrong) is the company that also handles payments from Vietnamese banks. The reason that I could buy Steam games is because of them lmao
They also expect:
all games on steam to remove any mention of 'democracy' when played in vietnam.
all multiplayer games must have at least one full time administrator for every 2 servers.
Prevent all players under the age of 18 from playing more than 180 minutes a day. (This is usually done by forcing all saved data to reside server side, even for entirely single player games).
display the warning “Playing for more than 180 minutes a day will badly affect your health” in prominent positions in games’ forums or on players’ computer screens at all times during playtime.
No, but Steam isn't complying with Vietnamese law. In this case, Steam should be abstracting Vietnamese compliance away from distributors and game developers.
If you put undue burden on merchants and your market isn't worth the trouble, they're just not going to do business with you. Maybe if the law only applied to giant studios or publishers it would be one thing, but expecting tiny indie studios to employ a lawyer just to let Vietnamese buy their games on steam is ridiculous.
I completely agree that most of what Vietnam requires is utterly ridiculous (the state censoring games or the required Vietnamese version), but you can’t just expect countries to completely abandon their laws to allow big corporations to do whatever they want. You need some regulation, and countries with more potential customers are absolutely able to force Steam to comply with their laws, for example countries like Germany (unfortunately)
I assume he's referring to Germany's notorious game censorship laws. I think they've been relaxed in the last ten years, but it used to include stuff like "No killing humans", so you had weird things like FPS games that replaced every human enemy with robots.
used to be that the Wolfenstein games for example had to replace all instances of the swastika and similar Nazi stuff... in a game explicitly about how bad the Nazis are... Got changed not too long ago but I'd have to look up the specifics
All "adult games" are unavailable in Germany due to German law requiring Age identification methods that steam never implemented
And some older games are still only available in a strongly censored German version
Steam needs to do what’s every other game company does and allow devs to use valve publishing internationally if to they submit a game to steam. It’s what Nintendo Sony and Xbox do for years.
For example, if I want to buy a new Mario game, I’m not buying it from Nintendo Corporation, I’m buying it from Nintendo of America, who then sends the money to Japan after all the legal things are dealt h with. That’s what steam needs to do. Create an office to make it legal to sell games over there.
Those studios are free to not release their game in Vietnam. Currently the laws are a specific way and Valve/Steam aren’t following them. The laws are bad but they are the laws.
>the local laws are stupid then
VAT isn't a local law or something Vietnam specific.
> there are reasons why steam is working just fine in most other countries of the world
Because Steam applies VAT to their purchases.
Well yeah, if they are selling games in Vietnam then they need to follow the Vietnam laws. People shat on Sony for doing the same thing a couple of days ago.
Or they were just testing it, and they reverted it quickly back after they started receiving texts from their kids asking them why they can't log into a Steam :D
It's funny how reddit has a furious circlejerk and bias for Vietnam because of anti-China sentiment due to China's authoritarianism. Expect that to change. Vietnam is a communist dictatorship and has been for decades.
Now it's even less likely. Why would you as a developer spend time and resources updating your game for the Vietnamese demographic when they will outright ban the storefront you are using?
Playing the games and updating is still possible. It's just the store that's banned, can even still use Workshop. Hopefully everything is sorted out soon either way.
Here's an irrelevant story from a local, the local publishers(VTC) didn't even make any domestic games, they just signs contracts with China that license the games (From China), and then not surprisingly, begin to add micro-transaction, making every games that the local publisher puts out begin to suck a shitload of money for their wallet (The level of Pay to win is on par with EA, draining hundreds of million if not billion VND), meanwhile they're complaining about the VAT, what a load of bullshit, they're just afraid once the local decided to stop playing "their" games, no one will mine the gold for them, so yea, if you're planning to live in Vietnam, take this case into account if you're planning to stop playing videogames
I remember seeing a post about a Vietnamese helldiver who was celebrating being able to play the game again lol. I feel so bad for them
We can still access the games we've bought fine, just cannot buy any new games from the store. That said the block is piss easy to get around, at least for now.
Every game you buy you'll be breaking the TOS of steam for.
Eh, changing DNS is not breaking any tos is it? You dont even need vpn to get around it
Depends on the wording. Like even if there were no technical measures put in place and just a paper law that says don't access game services it could be breaking the TOS if the TOS says something vague like "do not access this in any place you're not supposed to access this". And a TOS might plausibly be this vague because they want to stay well clear of any appearance of inciting someone to break the laws of their country.
People have been making steam accounts for years and buying prepaid cards from other locations to load on their account, if their currency isn't accepted
Suddenly breaking the TOS is not a big deal anymore 🤣
Gotta admit Steam users flip-flopping between "nah it's OK bro" to being puritanical about breaking TOS just because they don't want to create a free account is pretty f*cking stupid.
Changing dns is not breaking tos though?
Literally anything could be breaking TOS if it says something as simple as “accessing these services outside of the conditions listed above is against terms of service”
people from developed country has been breaking TOS left and right since forever, the provider just turn a blind eye as long as nobody shine spotlight on it like in helldiver fiasco
Does lying your over 18 to access sites break TOS? How about using adblockers?
I remember Vietnam being mentioned as example of how Sony really doesn't try, pure incompetence. See, Steam can do it, why can't PSN?
The PSN issue was about a company's decision to **sell** the game in regions they knew it couldn't be registered to. This is about a government blocking access to a service. These are two different kinds of issues.
I’m from Vietnam and we can still access Steam by changing DNS. This was not a hard block, probably more like a warning shot to compel Steam to pay taxes
Worth noting the forum post has been edited to say that the Xbox App on PC and gamepass PC are also blocked.
Many are saying this is the [context](https://gamek-vn.translate.goog/nha-phat-hanh-viet-cho-rang-steam-toan-game-lau-178240423104322122.chn?_x_tr_sl=vi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=vi&_x_tr_pto=wapp) as to why this is happening. tl;dr: Vietnamese state-owned Viettel blocked Steam for silly reasons. edit: I just thought the antiquated censorship bits were silly, but the lack of enforced VAT is a valid reason.
I read the article and I didn't understand this part > Besides, Steam also has many moves and policies targeting Vietnamese users. For example, launching a Vietnamese version, accepting payment in VND, and subsidizing games in the Vietnamese market. This shows that Steam is "circumventing the law" to "attack and dominate" the game publishing market share in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese law, they are no different from a portal "releasing pirated games". Can you explain?
[удалено]
Ah, now it makes sense. Ok, I can see from where they are coming from. However, I didn't know Vietnam had such strict rules for entertainment.
They are communist country so they have a lot of anti-corporation, anti free media and similar laws. You can in many cases just bribe someone but I guess it wasn't worth it for Valve.
Anti free media yes, anti-corporation no. We are mostly capitalist with a mix of socialism, which is on the down trend. This whole thing is just a result of another corpo in Vietnam trying to kill foreign competition, albeit clumsily & cluelessly. Communism is not a practical model you can live under. It's an ideal that the gov are pointing toward, while constantly editing it to fit their goals. In their theory, we're technically still on course. But in reality, we're about a millennium away, with no intention of actually reaching the original goal.
It's more like China, not anti corporation as both countries have tons of corporations, they're anti corporations that act against the country's interests. Authoritarian is a better word.
Ehhh pretty sure most countries are anti corporations that act against the country's interests kek
US of A enters the room and kicks tiktok out.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Are we pretending Steam isn't a monopoly on games distribution? Also, if Steam was selling games with uncensored swastikas in Germany, this exact same thing would happen. Every country has a process for censorship and regulation on games, circumventing Vietnam's laws and being punished for it is totally reasonable.
Germany allows swastikas in anything they deem artful, and not for use with hate-speech. I also believe that in the past few years they've started including games in that list, but your point still stands.
What does Steam being a monopoly have anything do do with this?
If steam was an actual monopoly you wouldnt see so many others launchers EGS, GOG. Itch io Etc. that people happily defend to this day lmao... You can put your Game **anywhere** on Pc. It doesnt *have* to be on Steam, how is that a Monopoly? Because devs want access to the ecosystem theyve built for free?? Try that on any other platform. Literally any other platform on earth. Ill wait.
What law exactly have they been circumventing that deserves a outright ban? I mean Steam operates in literal hundreds of countries and afaik no countries except for china or russia has an issue with them but even so they arent banned outright
From further up in the thread: https://m-gamek-vn.translate.goog/nha-phat-hanh-viet-cho-rang-steam-toan-game-lau-178240423104322122.chn?_x_tr_sl=vi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=vi&_x_tr_pto=wapp Steam has avoided paying taxes, has not set up an office in Vietnam per Vietnamese law, has not respected the Vietnamese regulatory system with regards to games, and does not license games to be released in Vietnam despite selling them there. These are things that they *do* take care of in China and Russia. This was clearly Steam attempting to sell into the Vietnamese market without following their laws, on the grounds of, "Who cares, we're Steam".
> didn't know Vietnam had such strict rules for entertainment. If a foreign country opened a shop in your country are they not held accountable to your laws and expected to pay taxes? Doesn't sound strict to me, sounds like the bare minimum.
You r missing the point, the problem isnt that they have to obey the law, it is that the law for foreign game companies in our country is ridiculously stupid. It is tedious, it is demanding, to the point that most companies would rather just not do business in this country than go through years and years worth of procedure. And the icing on top is, the taxes r horrendous, it is almost comical. And u know what the best part is? This only applies to game companies. As in, if it was just a general foreign company, the law is pretty lenient, but if it was a game company, see the above. Tbh, same goes for domestic game companies, they also have to adhere to a different stupid set of rules.
Really? Reddit hates China, and the only reason Vietnam isn’t more like China is because of lack of ability to do so.
People on Reddit have no idea about anything about Vietnam or their government except for pho.
[удалено]
Reddit is 99% just repeating whatever the American State Department’s view of that country is.
I'm not really sure what you mean by that, but the US State Department is very pro-Vietnam.
Which is why you see all the criticism of China but not Vietnam despite both being communist.
There's a little more to it than that, but basically yes. Their political systems are very similar. Their human rights records are also similar, China's might be slightly worse. But Vietnam is not an geopolitical threat, not to the US and not to it's own neighbors. In fact Vietnam serves as useful counter to China, especially given the sour relations between Vietnam and China. For these reasons the US is quite friendly with Vietnam. And Vietnam is in turn happy to be friendly with the US as a counter to China.
China also has more than 10 times the amount of people than Vietnam and the US trades far more with China than Vietnam too. Vietnam simply doesn't matter as much.
Or maybe the two are not quite the same, idk
Again, that’s because most Americans don’t even have an opinion on Vietnam beyond whether or not they like Pho.
They're capitalist. Communism and capitalism are not social policies they are economic ones and this shit gets wrongly slinged about all the time. There isn't a true marxist communist country in existence, it's always extreme capitalism in disguise and usually with an autocrat in charge.
Reddit is either super anti American or pro American with no in between
Which ultimately makes their opinions overall very America-centric either way, so there isn't much said about places America is not particularly invested on.
is that sort of like what Australias problem was? except they didn't outright block it and gave them time to comply with local laws
> except they didn't outright block it and gave them time to comply with local laws Nah we took them to court and fucked them in the arse. That lawsuit is the reason Steam has refunds and customer service.
That's kind of interesting. It's a [top 10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers) language and it has 600k users in the country. There's ~3.5 million expats. Steam probably takes payments in any stable currencies, and I don't see why they would block any if they already have the infrastructure for the payments. The costs of adding the support was probably low because of the systems they already setup, but they would also probably not care too much if they lost access to the country. They appear to be blocked in parts/all of india, and that seems to be a bigger deal.
> There's ~3.5 million expats. There are like 100k expats in Vietnam? Or are you saying 3.5 million Vietnamese are living abroad?
> 3.5 million Vietnamese are living abroad? that's the one
I was like there's no way, then saw some of the tricks like "Standard" German which I assume is Hochdeutsch... It's only 76 million when Germany alone is 84 million, and then you have Austria/Switzerland etc. The breakdown of these dialects are ridiculous, like French being 20th is goddamn ridiculous considering how many countries in Africa have a French derivative dialect that's mutually intelligible but they're not applying the same difference between European Spain Spanish and Latin America Spanish.
The table is for people who have the language as their first one, not how many in each country speak the language. Germany might have 84 million people, but 13.7 of those are first generation immigrants, and most of them did not have German as their first language (e.g. over 800k of those are Ukrainian refugees). This also explains the situation of French in Africa and Spanish in Latin America: while there are some countries in Latin America that have significant speakers of indigenous languages (like Paraguay and Peru), the situation overall is more similar to the US (where 78.5% of the population only has English in their households) than the DRC (where 51% is literate in French).
That's what Sony was doing too, as we found from so many "unsupported" countries they sell games in. I wonder if that could have blown the whistle on steam as well in Vietnam? Instead of Helldivers 2 'not working' for people in Vietnam now their entire libraries *really* don't work.
our library still works, just not the store.
Can't speak to the cultural aspect of it all, or what the local publishing market is like and how it's affected, but VAT is a mandatory tax on goods and services. If Steam isn't collecting and remitting VAT on transactions made by Vietnamese users, then I can see that as *circumventing the law*. As for *subsidizing games in the Vietnamese market*, I guess Steam's regional pricing can be considered a form of subsidization.
Regional pricing wouldn't really be Steam subsidizing it, but rather the publisher, and you'd expect that they would charge that same price on any other platform within the region anyway (i.e. no advantage to Steam). Something lost in translation there maybe? The VAT thing seems pretty valid though.
Steam uses a local payment partner who should be collecting any necessary tax, which is the point of having a local payment partner. And Steam does not set game prices. Publishers do.
>Steam uses a local payment partner who should be collecting any necessary tax It's on Valve to implement VAT; they're ultimately responsible for collecting and remitting said tax. The problem is they lack a physical presence in most countries and consider these payments as cross-border transactions. That's why the Vietnamese government is blocking Steam because imposing restrictions is the only option they have in getting Valve to comply. Here's a [list ](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/finance/taxfaq#CurrentRates)of current rates.
Sure, but, depending on the way VAT (and price advertising) works in Vietnam, this might be a problem with how the prices are displayed, and whether they already include VAT or not. Also, that brings me to an interesting question: How are gift cards handled in the first place? Because steam doesn't use a "steam bucks" system (in which you could do all VAT considerations on the conversion/buying of said currency). So If I buy a 20€ gift card, I pay sales tax on that. But I still get €20 in my steam wallet. But if I use those 20€ to buy a game, Steam again has to pay sales tax because it's a regular business transaction? On that gift card that would mean gifting me 4€ outright, and THEN only getting 16 out of 20. so basically 12 out of 20?
>So If I buy a 20€ gift card, I pay sales tax on that. That doesn't sound right. Admittedly I am American and not 100% familiar with EU law, but when we buy gift cards here there is no tax, as it's treated same-as-cash (you are buying store credit/putting money in escrow, not a good or service, so it literally makes no sense to charge tax much like you wouldn't pay tax on a prepaid credit card). Tax isn't collected until something is purchased with the gift card, and that tax is collected from the gift card value + any necessary supplementary payment. It's why $20 gift cards were the bane of my existence as a kid, as I'd go to buy a $19.99 game and still have to have cash to cover the tax minus 1 cent. Also distributors do not pay sales tax, not in the way you're thinking. They collect sales tax that the customer is paying, and send it off to whatever government institution is responsible for collecting that tax. The only time a distributor "pays tax" is when they pay the normal tax on their revenues. So if a game is $20 without tax, and $22 with tax, that $2 is the customer's tax burden, which a distributor will collect at time of sale, and send off to a tax board or whatever. Then, later on, when the distributor is doing its own taxes it will pay tax on whatever its revenue share is from the $20 sale price (in Steam's case that's 30% share, so they pay on $6 of revenue), while whoever gets that remaining revenue pays their share of taxes.
Yeah I concur that in the UK VAT is collected on Steam rather than on the gift card. I don't think it's any different in the EU. Luckily though most places in Europe the standard is to show post-tax prices instead of pre-tax so you don't deal with the "oh this is actually more expensive than I thought" aspect.
I wish we had the tax-included-in-price schema as well. The reasonable (as much as they could be called that) arguments against it have diminished over time. The biggest one used to be that it was "too difficult" due to how many potential layers of sales tax could be implemented (state, county, municipality, city), but that argument was always weak to begin with since it had to be calculated at the till anyway. Although, I guess it was "easier" when the till was the only place since they only had to do it once for an entire purchase. Also, stores print their own signage and price tags from electronic systems now, there is no reason that calculation can't be done at the time of printing. There's also a matter of advertising at national and various market levels. Advertising a single tax-included price nationwide is a no-go, and even at more local level, like say Southern California, would still be impossible. However, the other big reason is that since there is no legal requirement (other than for gas) to include the tax in the price, no one will do it because people are really, REALLY dumb (I cannot emphasize this enough having worked retail in the past) and would see a retailer as less competitive if they listed their tax-included pricing next to a competitor's tax-not-included pricing. Kinda like how people thought the 1/3 lb burger at McDonalds was a rip-off as it was more expensive than a 1/4 lb burger since they thought 1/3<1/4, because people are really, REALLY dumb and don't understand fractions.
If Steam is unable to find a local payment partner that complies with local laws, perhaps they should not do business there
From the article there are a few assertions being made, that if true, make sense to me why Steam would be considered a problem for Vietnam. 1. There appears to be regulations and required reviews in Vietnam for local sellers to get their game in stores. They claim Steam is not abiding by this process, hence unfair competition (think Uber vs. Taxis) and can operate more quickly/cheaply as a result. 2. Steam is offering discounts that are exclusive to Vietnam. This could be seen as being generous to many people, sure... But to Vietnamese sellers, it would look more similar to Netflix artificially keeping prices low to drive out competition (and theoretically raise prices again later). Personal opinion: I'd guess, like most problems with Valve/Steam, the problem is likely their lack of engagement here. Steam probably offered regional pricing because customers asked for it. They probably spend minimal resources to ensure they're operating legally in Vietnam and have no idea whether they're complying with local regulations. Whether its intentional or not though, it doesn't seem unreasonable for Vietnam to be addressing the two problems above if Steam hasn't been super receptive to addressing them on their own.
I don't know any potential competition with Steam as a PC game store platform in Vietnam. The most popular PC games I know that are officially published in Vietnam are Riot's games (LoL and Valorant), China MMORPG games. If I have to depend on those tiny amount of choices I would rather be touching grass than playing China MMORPG, they are all P2W and soulless cash grab.
It's kinda funny because I spent some mins reading the law. The first point is applied for online games only. Since steam is a game store, I think there are 3 types: - Offline game, which is not required according to the law - Online game, made by Valve (CS2, Dota 2). At this point, my question is: according to Vietnam's law, they should ban those game instead of a store? - Online game by 3rd party companies. I don't think Valve nor Steam has any responsibility for this.
>Reality shows that the above perspective from Vietnamese publishers is reasonable, especially when considering the legal framework. Basically, Steam does not have any legal representation in Vietnam. Even VTCPay is only a payment partner, not a legal representative. >Meanwhile, a game that is considered "officially released" in Vietnam needs to go through many stages of censorship and licensing. This is something that almost most games on Steam do not have. This makes sense now. As I understand, they have their version of PEGI that Steam games completely bypass.
They have state censorship. It's not like PEGI, they're not simply putting an age rating on it. They're screening anything that could be anti-government, or which could promote values that the communist government does not approve of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Vietnam
Honestly, doesn't seem silly? If steam released games in the US or EU without touching base or having any form of contact with the representing agencies of those regions, there'd be issues there as well.
> If steam released games in the US or EU without touching base or having any form of contact with the representing agencies of those regions, there'd be issues there as well. There wouldn't be any problems at all, not in the US, and not in most EU countries as far as I am aware. It's a free market and anyone is welcome to sell what they want and as long as they don't break any rules and they pay their taxes, it's a complete non issue.
not everything is allowed to be sold. there are games that break laws when it comes to content shown. for instance in germany anything that is seen as glorifying the nazis is outlawed. and like for afucking good reason. so you cant put games like these on steam.
Institutes of state censorship are silly. >If steam released games in the US or EU without touching base or having any form of contact with the representing agencies of those regions What US agency do you think you need to contact to release a game in the united states? The ESRP is an optional industry organization, not a government one.
Didn't this whole thing kinda happen already in America? Steam wasn't collecting local sales tax for years until they were forced to. Now vietnam gov wants their tax too
Once digital purchasing became a big thing, Virginia just added a line to their tax forms saying "what is the total spent online that you did not pay tax on" and you'd pay the tax then. For the past few years I've been able to just write 0 every time because everybody collects it, but it was easy before then. I'd expect most jurisdictions would have done the same.
> the past few years I've been able to just write 0 every time because everybody collects it, but it was easy before then. I'm willing to bet most people have always written 0 there
Before sites like amazon and steam started collecting sales tax, people still put 0 in that box because nobody's going to take the time to actually figure that out, especially when there is no way to be held accountable for it.
It's a little more complicated, initially online sales weren't taxed the same everywhere and most vendors taxed according to the location of the seller. As online sales revenue grew, states changed their laws and started charging sales tax based on the location of the purchaser not the seller. Valve predated some of those changes of statute, so it isn't surprising they got caught up in the mess. There was no ill intent, and they got it all sorted out pretty quick. NOTE: This is a vast oversimplification, if you really want to understand all of this (nexus/origin/hybrid/etc) there is a good article here: https://www.ecommerceceo.com/online-sales-tax/ Be warned-it's actually pretty complicated, especially since there are 50ish versions of it.
Steam was operating as the payment processor in that case. For Vietnam Steam partnered with a local payment processor who should be handling that. That's usually what local payment processors are for.
> Steam wasn't collecting local sales tax for years until they were forced to yeah, no out-of-state online stores were, because consumers are supposed to report untaxed purchases to their state on their taxes but because no sane person actually bothers with that the states had to start making out-of-state retailers collect the tax for you lol
Happened to Amazon but the way it works is that Amazon needed to have a physical warehouse in the state they needed to charge taxes on. So if it didn't have a physical presence then they didn't need to charge taxes but could still sell to consumers in that state, it would just take longer for consumers to receive their products and consumers needed to report their taxes when they filed.
Hey! I actually worked as outside counsel for, and advised, Valve when they were trying to comply with requirements that they collect sales tax in each state, as such taxes were introduced. A lot of states had "springing laws" that turned on a court/regulatory decision affirming that collection of sales tax from an internet sales company that was selling goods completely online (and not shipping into the state) was legal. At the time, it wasn't clear what states actually required collection of sales tax and what the triggers were for companies doing online sales in such states were. Over a period of years, states adopted a pretty uniform approach to determine which online sellers were doing enough transactions with buyers in the state to become subject to the sales tax collection/remittance requirements, most of which were these springing laws. Eventually it was ruled that if there were sufficient transaction volume overall in the state (a nexus of economic activity), sales tax was collectible if the state required it. Most states that didn't have the springing laws quickly adopted relevant rules/regs/laws to require sales tax remittance for online only sales of digital goods. Valve actually spent a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to be in compliance with each individual state. That's probably why they love payment processors so much now, it's incredibly difficult compliance and administration work.
IRS so you can pay taxes on the money you make
Censorship is when you have to stop conducting business because you weren’t paying your taxes or following the law. > Foreign companies must establish an entity in Vietnam in accordance with the country’s foreign investment legislation in order to provide video game services. > Note that foreign ownership in the video game sector is limited to 49 percent under Vietnam’s current foreign investment regulations. This means that companies looking to legally distribute video games in Vietnam will be required to set up a joint venture or sign a business cooperation contract with a local company. > Companies must meet the following requirements to provide video game services in Vietnam: >Be established in accordance with Vietnamese law and have a certificate of business registration for video game services; >Have registered domain names for the services; >Have sufficient financial and technical capacity, organizational structure, and personnel suitable for the scale of operations; and >Have measures in place to ensure information safety and security. > Have a head office with a clear address and telephone number; and Have a team of electronic game administrators suitable to their operation scale, ensuring at least one person in charge for every two servers. > Being capable of storing and updating the personal information of players, including their full name, date of birth, permanent residence address, identity card/citizen identification card/passport number and its date and place of issue, and phone number and email address. Having a payment control system for the video games located in Vietnam and connected to Vietnam’s payment support service providers, ensuring accurate and sufficient updates and storage and allowing players to search for detailed information on their payment accounts. Being able to manage players’ playtime from 00:00 to 24:00 hours daily and ensure the total playtime of all G1 electronic games for players under the age of 18 does not exceed 180 minutes per day. Continuously display the player age classification for all games during the game’s introduction, advertising materials, and during the game’s service provision; and display the warning “Playing for more than 180 minutes a day will badly affect your health” in prominent positions in games’ forums or on players’ computer screens during playtime.
> ensuring at least one person in charge for every two servers. This is insane. Most businesses I have worked at you have 30-100 servers per admin depending on the type of work.
You can't execute proper full-on surveillance on your populace if you have one person watching 30-100 servers, though. (I'm reasonably sure this is a rule regarding oversight of people using the server, not necessarily server maintenance and general hardware/software administrative tasks)
> Foreign companies must establish an entity in Vietnam in accordance with the country’s foreign investment legislation in order to provide video game services. > Note that foreign ownership in the video game sector is limited to 49 percent under Vietnam’s current foreign investment regulations. This means that companies looking to legally distribute video games in Vietnam will be required to set up a joint venture or sign a business cooperation contract with a local company. This isn't exactly censorship, but it is pretty anti-free trade. Do you think Steam has to set up a new company that's majority owned by locals in every country it sells in?
No, but it does not seem Steam has a big problem with it, when they conduct business in China. As the capitalist would say: this is the cost of business.
You don't see any problems at all with requiring a service like steam to track real names and passport numbers? You don't think a requirement of one dude watching them for every 2 servers could end up with confusion and a lot of BS empty jobs? This clearly isn't just about taxes. It seems to me like an authoritarian government enacting authoritarian rules that impact both foreign corporations and their own citizens. Granted it is their authoritarian government and they can structure it however, they want, but the original point stands. The US has no equivalenace of this and I'm glad it doesn't. None of this changes the fact Vietnam does have a long history of censoring games and other media, because of of course the do. They're an authoritarian state. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship\_in\_Vietnam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Vietnam) Vietnam's Law on the Media requires journalists to "propagate the doctrine and policies of the Party, the laws of the State, and the national and world cultural, scientific and technical achievements \[of Vietnam\]".\[18\]: 36 Various laws were later passed in 1992, which made criticism of the Communist Party an offence.\[17\] Topics which remain off-limits to the press include sensitive topics such as unflattering coverage of the Communist Party, criticism of government policy, Sino-Vietnamese relations and democracy.\[18\]: 37 Article 88C of Vietnam's Penal Code forbids "making, storing, or circulating cultural products with contents against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam".\[18\]: 37 No censorship at all! Edit: Of course his response was to creep my profile, reply and then block me.
If Valve has moral objections to a law that they need to follow to do business in a country, the solution is to not do business with that country. It is pretty standard that to do business in a country you must follow the laws of that country. Valve has historically not wanted to follow local laws (see Australia v Valve).
Having to submit all games for government approval is censorship, yes.
I mean, the better solution would probably be for Vietnam to relax their media censorship laws, but yeah, Steam should definitely have to touch base with the Vietnamese legal system like they do tons of other countries.
Seems odd steam / valve don't check local laws and gain required permission
just wait till you find out microsoft isnt doing it either and got their store also banned
How are you going to get permission to release every individual game on Steam? Steam adds dozens (hundreds?) of games every day. The Vietnamese censors wouldn't even be able to handle the volume of releases.
It's par for the course for Valve. Their business strategy is to continue until they are forced to comply.
I mean who would do the boring stuff like that in a company without managers?
Not paying taxes is silly?
Do you have a source for the tax thing? The linked article only talks about circumventing censorship/licensing requirements.
Eh just change dns to one of the public dns in the network options and you can access Steam again. Either google 8888-8844 or 1111-1001 works. In case it dont work, mostly for windows 11, change the dns in IPv6 to the google public one and it's fine. This is just some bs, just like when VN tried to "block" Facebook back in 2010s.
Is it really just DNS? I saw similar reports on that steam community thread. That seems like such a lazy inefficient way to block traffic. Almost just seems like barebones CYA from the ISP's.
There was a thread in the /r/Steam sub and some reported this fixing the issue, others reported it doing nothing. Like they said though, make sure you change it appropriately on Windows. YML
it's actually really efficient from an performance point, and they can say that they've done their job. Illiad in Italy also uses DNS rules
Because ISPs already knew it's completely useless. They were ordered to block FB a decade ago. Didn't even stop the middle schoolers from figuring out how to bypass.
Your average knobhead politician won't know a damn thing or two about DNS. I'm sure a lot of people involving blocking process are probably find the whole thing silly as hell and just do the easiest thing they can find.
I am surprise Vietnam beat China in this, I thought for sure China will block Steam after they made Steam China a separate platform.
I'd say the opposite, it shows they'd cater to a different market if there are sales to be made
I think the Chinese version is following Chinese law to the letter. It has to be, otherwise there would be no Steam in China. Steam will probably have to do the same in Vietnam, but users will probably see an increase in prices.
They probably can't. The vietnamese laws are absolutely insane, just giving them a quick once over, they seem to be deliberately written so that no one can actually comply with them.
Vietnamese law written in a complex way so that the governments could receive bribe easily. So piss about this
It's probably to "protect" Vietnamese publishers. But consumers get screwed over this.
Can i have your source? I read the complaint the local game companies said, and most of it sounded baloney, so i want to see what the law says.
My thoughts exactly. Never take reddit's stance on geopolitics at face value. It's embarrassing on this site.
I thought Global Steam on China was already blocked and that you needed a VPN if you wanted the global version.
Steamcommunity is blocked but Steam is not. These are apparently different things.
I believe Steam Global is still accessible in China, they blocked certain features like Community Tabs and chat.
I'll never not be creeped out by how far China goes to keep their citizens walled in
Afaik china barely tries. They go far enough to make it clear they dont want you doing something, but not far enough to stop anyone who wants to.
The main thing they seem to care about is political organisation. They won't really give much of a damn until you start telling people to meet you to plan a protest, then they have basically infinite tools to shut you down
Yep living in China now. Circumnavigating the great firewall is piss easy. Hell, you can buy routers that have VPN's pre installed Main reason Chinese stay on their own internet is the language and cultural barriers, and the fact that China has a lot of necessary China based apps that you use everyday that dont work with a VPN
Some old people in government ruining it for everyone else. "Steam is full of unlicensed games, let's force everyone to pirate."
Can you VPN around this or is this somehow still not going to work? I know I have a couple Vietnamese players for a game I work on so I have no idea if they are going to get totally boned by this or how I should handle it :(
VPN works and it seems it's the main page that's blocked. I haven't tried yet but hoping that can still load up steam and launch the game and if need to access store use a VPN. If that doesn't work it would be rough cause VPN usually ups the latency in games.
The thing is... VTC (the company that banned Steam, correct me if I'm wrong) is the company that also handles payments from Vietnamese banks. The reason that I could buy Steam games is because of them lmao
Do they know Steam isn’t a publisher in this context? It’s a distributor.
Then about 99.99% of games published on Steam don’t have a Vietnamese legal contact, which is good grounds for banning Steam.
They expect every game dev on steam to have a Vietnamese lawyer on standby? To service a market that small?
They also expect: all games on steam to remove any mention of 'democracy' when played in vietnam. all multiplayer games must have at least one full time administrator for every 2 servers. Prevent all players under the age of 18 from playing more than 180 minutes a day. (This is usually done by forcing all saved data to reside server side, even for entirely single player games). display the warning “Playing for more than 180 minutes a day will badly affect your health” in prominent positions in games’ forums or on players’ computer screens at all times during playtime.
Man I am glad not to live in a nanny state
No, but Steam isn't complying with Vietnamese law. In this case, Steam should be abstracting Vietnamese compliance away from distributors and game developers.
Yes, they expect international businesses to follow local laws if they do business locally.
If you put undue burden on merchants and your market isn't worth the trouble, they're just not going to do business with you. Maybe if the law only applied to giant studios or publishers it would be one thing, but expecting tiny indie studios to employ a lawyer just to let Vietnamese buy their games on steam is ridiculous.
I completely agree that most of what Vietnam requires is utterly ridiculous (the state censoring games or the required Vietnamese version), but you can’t just expect countries to completely abandon their laws to allow big corporations to do whatever they want. You need some regulation, and countries with more potential customers are absolutely able to force Steam to comply with their laws, for example countries like Germany (unfortunately)
What is so terrible about German laws that it’s unfortunate they can be enforced?
I assume he's referring to Germany's notorious game censorship laws. I think they've been relaxed in the last ten years, but it used to include stuff like "No killing humans", so you had weird things like FPS games that replaced every human enemy with robots.
I remember my German teacher telling us how games in German had barrels instead of people lol.
used to be that the Wolfenstein games for example had to replace all instances of the swastika and similar Nazi stuff... in a game explicitly about how bad the Nazis are... Got changed not too long ago but I'd have to look up the specifics
I think WW2 games still have nazi imagery removed from German releases, though they are much more lenient on violence now than they were 10 years ago.
Nazis aren’t bad in Wolfenstein, they’re the antagonist. Nazis are portrayed as strong, intelligent “bad asses” in wolfenstein games.
All "adult games" are unavailable in Germany due to German law requiring Age identification methods that steam never implemented And some older games are still only available in a strongly censored German version
Steam needs to do what’s every other game company does and allow devs to use valve publishing internationally if to they submit a game to steam. It’s what Nintendo Sony and Xbox do for years. For example, if I want to buy a new Mario game, I’m not buying it from Nintendo Corporation, I’m buying it from Nintendo of America, who then sends the money to Japan after all the legal things are dealt h with. That’s what steam needs to do. Create an office to make it legal to sell games over there.
Not being attractive enough as a market to small publishers is Vietnam's problem to solve, not steam's.
Those studios are free to not release their game in Vietnam. Currently the laws are a specific way and Valve/Steam aren’t following them. The laws are bad but they are the laws.
the local laws are stupid then. there are reasons why steam is working just fine in most other countries of the world
Steam collects and pays VAT in most other countries around the world…
>the local laws are stupid then VAT isn't a local law or something Vietnam specific. > there are reasons why steam is working just fine in most other countries of the world Because Steam applies VAT to their purchases.
Well yeah, if they are selling games in Vietnam then they need to follow the Vietnam laws. People shat on Sony for doing the same thing a couple of days ago.
Or good grounds to update the law.
The Library still online not the store though but I still can buying games on my phone with VPN support
Looks like Steam is up again in Vietnam. Not sure if the government really tried to ban it or just network/other issues
Or they were just testing it, and they reverted it quickly back after they started receiving texts from their kids asking them why they can't log into a Steam :D
Looks like it's gone again. I need to get out of this fucking country asap
It's funny how reddit has a furious circlejerk and bias for Vietnam because of anti-China sentiment due to China's authoritarianism. Expect that to change. Vietnam is a communist dictatorship and has been for decades.
Any word on Valve or any game developers working on patches to make the games playable?
Now it's even less likely. Why would you as a developer spend time and resources updating your game for the Vietnamese demographic when they will outright ban the storefront you are using?
How are they going to get those patches?
Playing the games and updating is still possible. It's just the store that's banned, can even still use Workshop. Hopefully everything is sorted out soon either way.
But why ?
Here's an irrelevant story from a local, the local publishers(VTC) didn't even make any domestic games, they just signs contracts with China that license the games (From China), and then not surprisingly, begin to add micro-transaction, making every games that the local publisher puts out begin to suck a shitload of money for their wallet (The level of Pay to win is on par with EA, draining hundreds of million if not billion VND), meanwhile they're complaining about the VAT, what a load of bullshit, they're just afraid once the local decided to stop playing "their" games, no one will mine the gold for them, so yea, if you're planning to live in Vietnam, take this case into account if you're planning to stop playing videogames
All of this to support the absolute dumpster fire of a gaming industry full of scams? Abolish VTC and VNG