Russian media agency Interfax (via The 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 the registry of prohibited sites can 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’s Discord ban.
So it’s likely that whatever materials Steam was previously hosting in Russia crossed one or more of those lines, and it’s likely that Steam complied so as to avoid being hit by the same hammer that knocked Discord out of the country last week, but I’ll let you know if either organisation gets back to me to say differently.
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 creating its own Steam. And Steam Deck. And SteamOS. Digital sovereignty, after all, extends to videogames too.