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Steam has been banned in China
- brian-armstrong 5y agoBoilers on notice!
- 32ninin3 5y agoEuropean and American economies will be destroyed by China soon. But their stockholm syndrome prevents them from doing anything against it.
- OtomotO 5y agoImperiums fall, such is the effect of time. And in time others rise, sometimes in the same region. China will fall too, at some point. Memento mori, amor fati!
- fosk 5y agoSic transit gloria mundi.
- enkid 5y agoOoookkkkk. That's not even China's goal. China need the US and Europe to have strong economies to sell stuff to for the foreseeable future. China doesn't have a strong consumer sector, outside real estate, which is not a good driver for growth in the long term, and the demographics of China mean it's not likely to develop a strong consumer class before the work force ages out.
- medstrom 5y agoBut why do you need to sell stuff to anyone, once everyone else has shit economy? You can lie back and relax at that point, you're still top of the heap.
- eunos 5y agoEh these days biggest trade partner for China is ASEAN, it will be much bigger of course if other Asia included. Especially when RCEP become effective.
- sgjohnson 5y agoWhat is China going to do? Tell their corporations to take on trillions upon trillions of foreign currency denominated debt, become unable to repay it, default on it all and go bankrupt? Because that seems like the current MO.
- dragonelite 5y agoWouldn't be surprised if tencent and others are going to launch their own app store. Tencent already partially did with the epic game store. Pull some string in China to block steams global edition to even out the fight for epic game store. Tencent owns like 40~48% of epic.
- chunghuaming 5y agoDoubtful, Xi Jing Ping is hellbent on destroying the Chinese tech industry right now
- dragonelite 5y agoIn what way has the Chinese government destroyed Chinese tech. The big tech companies are still there just more regulated. They are also still innovating. The Chinese government does actually know the difference between real productive forces and the stock market. It would be really weird for a socialist government to not know the theoretic works of Marx, lenin and stalin.
- jfoster 5y agoI didn't know until now that Tencent owned such a large stake in Epic. Makes me wonder a little about the disputes with Google & Apple. Whilst Epic seems to be fighting the good fight, I've thought it was very odd that they were putting so much on the line in their Google & Apple battles. Now I have to wonder if Tencent endorsed those legal battles with some more ambitious goal in mind.
- dragonelite 5y agoBehind every big battle or war there is always a motivation to gain market access. This was true for ww1 and ww2 and I wouldn't be surprised it is true in these legal battles. Wouldnt be surprised that tencent actually was the key player that pushed epic to open source their unreal engine so that the US can't block the unreal engine code base from being exported to China.
- meibo 5y agoNote: this refers to the global Steam service/community - Valve still offers Steam China with a very limited/censored selection of mostly-Valve games, adhering to local child protection laws. Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead, as this Chinese version of Steam has only been available since February 2021.
- foverzar 5y agoI really love how we all have an impression of China as a country without access to global internet, but then there are things like "Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead". Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets.
- blahgeek 5y agoIt’s not true that chinese don’t has “access to global internet”. Many sites are blocked (including most top sites), but still it’s a blacklist instead of a whitelist
- mrjin 5y agoI thought so too until one day I suddenly found myself was able to access google.com etc. without any issue for days until I search some sensitive keywords when I was in mainland China. So the blocking seems to be heuristic instead of a blacklist. And also it seems GFW is able to filter SSL contents as I have always been using HTTPS if I can.
- whimsicalism 5y agoThe GFW is not a monolith, it seems to differ depending on where you are. I think ISPs implement it differently. The Beijing ones were the most sophisticated
- flohofwoe 5y ago
- ganzuul 5y agoIn my eyes, the attack on 'effeminate men' is the nail in the coffin for the government of China. They are as dead to me and my actions will reflect it. Down with Emperor Pooh!
- IsThisYou 5y agoAlso maybe the genocide in Xinjiang. The constant attacks against India. Daily sending war planes into Taiwan's air defense zone. Using armed fishing vessels to militarily attack the Philippines. Raiding the fishing grounds of poor countries by turning off transponders and sending hundreds of fishing vessels into their national waters at night. Destroying world heritage nature reserves to steal fish. And don't get me started about the crimes the Chinese Communists are doing to the Chinese people...
- marderfarker2 5y ago
- IsThisYou 5y agoSorry, I have no idea what you are trying to tell me.
- marderfarker2 5y ago
- cinntaile 5y agoJudging from your comment history, there are quite a bit of China comments there.
- dang 5y agoYou can't do this on HN, as the site guidelines make extremely clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Moreover, you've been breaking the guidelines repeatedly and egregiously. I've therefore banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- taway54321 5y ago
- siva7 5y agoNot sure if this is satire or you need help
- inglor_cz 5y agoThis is how China is going to sell itself and its political model in the coming decades. I wish the OPs comment wasn't flagged and dead, because we need to stop closing our eyes in front of this development and start preparing ourselves mentally for combatting it. Chinese model is going to be sold as a method of building unified, mission-oriented nations that have long term objectives and do not spend their energy and resources on endless squabbles of special interest groups. This will be attractive to some people who crave political stability and economic growth, at least as long as China really grows. It will probably only stop working after some major crash / bubble burst in the Chinese economy.
- ls612 5y agoI don’t think he is saying this is ‘good’ insofar as people should like it, he is saying that a model which produces more will outcompete by force one which produces less, regardless of the living conditions of the people living under that model. That is why the conclusion is “the future is scary”.
- johnhowardstein 5y ago
- Abroszka 5y agoRecently I have been getting a lot more annoyed about China. Sure they can ban things, it's their right. But I just don't understand why we are not doing the same.
- darthrupert 5y agoTo put it bluntly: Because we're better than them.
- Abroszka 5y agoYet we are allowing human right abuses? I think we only care about money, that's why we allow this to happen. Just look at Intel right now, apologizing for not using slave labour...
- OtomotO 5y agoNot by a large margin, but yes, yes you are, to some extent still. I just wished you and Europe where as good as your PR, I really and genuinely do
- Ostrogodsky 5y agoImpossible. You are thinking about it as an exercise in rationality and morals. This is a fight of chimp tribes, all the bla bla about human rights,justice, liberty is a very thin coat about the hate for the other band of apes. We are talking about 7 million years of evolution in action.
- siva7 5y agoWhat is going on here with the comment section? Seems like it's flooded with pro ccp activists
- rosndo 5y agoStandard practice anywhere you have Chinese people, most are perfectly reasonable but many are deeply indoctrinated nationalists. Unfortunately the rest aren’t willing or able to do anything about the genocide cheerleader squad.
- simonh 5y agoThe communist party party has successfully managed to associate love of China with loyalty to the party and government, and criticism of the party with being “anti-Chinese”. So being pro-democracy in Hong Kong is being anti-China, and opposing the ethnic and cultural suppression in Xinjiang is China hating. My wife is Chinese and we have a Chinese friend here in the UK we have to be careful what we say to. She gets upset if anything critical of the Chinese government comes up, because she “loves China”. We love China too, just not the communist party.
- philliphaydon 5y ago> We love China too, just not the communist party. I lived in singapore for 10 years until recently moving to Taiwan, this is basically the view of everyone from China I met. “I love China but I hate the government, that’s why I left” It’s a shame because the actions of the CCP are making people blame Chinese people. But the majority of people from China that I’ve met are awesome.
- whimsicalism 5y agoWell yeah, you're self selecting for people who a. Left China b. Are talking to a foreigner about politics CCP maintains considerable support among the mainland population.
- OtomotO 5y ago"we've always been at war with eastasia" The major problem I see, is that every major power uses propaganda to their benefit, yet even highly intelligent people often don't see the propaganda of their native (or chosen) home. I see the propaganda of China, Russia as well as the one of the US and Europe. There are no white, selfless knights around. There never were. Does that mean that nothing matters, that (subjective) morale suddenly is meaningless? Of course it doesn't! But it puts "them vs us" into perspective. Humans are humans and act like humans all around the world.
- cosmodisk 5y agoWell it's the first page from 'Politics for Dummies': find an enemy and blame it for everything. If there's no enemy,create one or even imagine one.
- tristor 5y agoAnd if you already have an enemy and they’re doing horrible things, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth, tell people about it. Comparing China’s bad behavior to the bad behavior of the West is a false equivalence on every aspect. It is clear that the West also has (or had) bad behavior, but bringing it up is a form of whataboutism to distract from the much worse behavior happening right now in China.
- OtomotO 5y agoNo it is not. All this whataboutism talk is besides the point. I am not saying what China is doing is right, I am saying that others are equally worse and we should deal with that TOO. And yes, the US invading foreign soil is equally bad.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoOf course I see Western propaganda, but at least Western propaganda pretends to benefit me. So I would rather pretend to believe in Western progaganda than Chinese propaganda. „Humans are humans“ is dangerously naive in a world full of thug nations.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago> The move comes as a surprise How dense and gullible do you have to be? Do people keep forgetting they’re dealing with an authoritarian dictatorship? ANYTHING is on the table, nothing should come as a surprise. Divest from China and diversify manufacturing sources, otherwise we will wake up one day imprisoned, and „the move will come as a surprise“
- threatofrain 5y agoThis is also not a surprise because tech journalists as early as February already anticipated that Valve working on a Chinese version of Steam implied a later ban for the "international" version.
- ketzu 5y ago> Do people keep forgetting they’re dealing with an authoritarian dictatorship? > ANYTHING is on the table, nothing should come as a surprise. That does not follow from the first part. People and politics can, at large, still be predictable independent of the political organization.
- pksebben 5y agoI would argue that any single individual is perfectly capable of being unpredictable, so any form of authoritarianism would derive that unpredictability. This is, fwig, the instability that a republic is meant to fix.
- jetsetgo 5y ago
- beebeepka 5y ago
- chunghuaming 5y agoYou call it jingoism. I call it rise against dictatorships destroying democracy's way of life.
- amzin 5y agoSent the link to my son who is an avid gamer. Got an one-word response: "Winnienet". Could not phrase it better.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dungPatrol 5y ago
- armendhammer 5y agoBanning google, banning, crypto, banning Steam, so much for progress.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoeh, crypto might have been the right choice tho
- jokoon 5y agoI just asked my 23 years old sister if she knew what Steam was, she said no. I would guess that China doesn't have any big enough economic advantage of allowing steam, so maybe steam is not that really big that people think. Not to mention Valve takes a large cut of game sales so China has pretty good reasons to block it. Aren't PC game sales a big stagnant? And on all those sales, Steam seems to be interesting for indie and niches games, not for big AAA games, since those AAA games often have their own online platform. I looked some numbers some time ago, and to me it seems that the PC game market is not really profitable anymore. And honestly, China might also increase its game profits by banning steam. When you can legally push a product out to make more money, you do it. China doesn't care about liberal economics.
- 300bps 5y agoChina seems more anti-game than it seems pro-profit in this case. Otherwise why limit children to 3 hours per week of gaming? Why ban images of “effeminate men”? To me, China seems to be preparing.
- xvector 5y ago> To me, China seems to be preparing. This is a really interesting perspective. If China is trying to masculinize its teenage male population, we could see it engage in conflict as soon as these teenagers grow into adults at their physical prime, 6-8 years from now. I think it's entirely likely that China will attempt to annex Taiwan within the next 10 years. I think we will also see China be one of the first countries to engage in large-scale cyberwarfare alongside any physical conflict, e.g. DOS'ing civilian communications.
- 300bps 5y agoYes China seems to have a very long term perspective with their five year plans that they seem to take very seriously. Couple that with the treatment China received in the Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking, etc. I type on computers for a living so take it with a grain of salt. But it seems to me China was on top technologically for thousands of years. Then they suffered humiliations for hundreds of years. And I think they’re done with that.
- beebmam 5y agoWhat will happen to Chinese games on Steam? I will be profoundly sad if they disappear. For example: Dyson Sphere Program is one of my favorite games of all time. If that's gone, I'm going to have a hard time not making the CCP my mortal enemy
- hwers 5y ago(Wow thanks for that gem, looks amazing I just bought it in case it goes away.)
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago> If that's gone, I'm going to have a hard time not making the CCP my mortal enemy Wouldn't be a bad choice, regardless of what happens with Steam.
- 7sidedmarble 5y ago> > If that's gone, I'm going to have a hard time not making the CCP my mortal enemy > Wouldn't be a bad choice, regardless of what happens with Steam. I can't tell if this is an ideological thing or not. There's a lot of states out there to vehemently dislike. But it's always this creepy strain of cold war torch-bearing that is so many people's pet cause. For the record, I think almost all states are on the exact same level of hateable, as a concept.
- auggierose 5y agoThat's wrong. Saying that two things are the same doesn't make them the same. So a comment like yours is either totally naive, or paid for by China.
- sovietmudkipz 5y agoThe Chinese government != the Chinese people. Whenever geopolitics separates artists from their audiences, it’s just sad. It’s in a similar vein of when total war is waged; the governments talk a big game but it’s the common, every day people who suffer. If you have an axe to grind be advised to make sure it’s targeted at the right people.
- vfulco2 5y agoDecentralized web advancements will continue to punch holes.
- tjpnz 5y agoYou don't need web3 to punch holes in The Great Firewall of China. I've got a tech illiterate acquaintance living there right now and they regularly finds ways around it.
- unityByFreedom 5y agoThat explains why China decided to propagandize the whole internet.
- tjpnz 5y agoPretty much. Seen /r/worldnews recently?
- ngcc_hk 5y agoThe real q should be what is not banned …
- lenkite 5y agoThankfully, Taiwanese game franchises like "Sword & Fairy" are still available. It's deeply irritating that Emperor Xi is now butting his interfering nose into gaming entertainment.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoMaybe they don't want a dull population sitting many hours playing games and eat junk food. Or they want the population to use some domestic platform, I am not sure, but even the Google ban has some legitimacy perhaps, when considering the amount of misleading news articles. China does propaganda, the US outlets lie selectively according to their bias. And such things can and will lead to having Trump elected with his maga disciples. I think both are equally bad, just different.
- scotty79 5y agoOr maybe they don't want kids learning to communicate and cooperate randomly with each other through online games.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoOr maybe they prefer that only video games that espouse loyalty to the party and communist values become the only possible types of games played, so they whittle away right along the road to achieving that goal
- NelsonMinar 5y agoIt might not actually be banned; there are reports on Twitter and Reddit saying it's just a DNS cache poisoning attack similar to one a few years ago. No one's posting good verifiable info though so I don't really know. Steam definitely seems to be inaccessible in China right now, but why and whether it's intentional is not yet clear.
- viktorcode 5y agoBut a ban can be expected, as Chinese government enforces a system that allows only pre-approved games to be available to the country citizens. Chinese gaming companies too had been hit with bans.
- octagons 5y agoThis correlates with some of the other reports I’ve read and I appreciate your skepticism. A “ban” is certainly not outside the realm of possibilities in China, especially given some of the new social policies, but we cannot afford to react like this whenever the word “China” makes its way into a headline if we want to draw attention to the real “bad” things.
- LeanderK 5y ago> anti-Chinese, including the presence of "effeminate men" How can effeminate men be anti-chinese?
- stjohnswarts 5y agoBecause it is preventing Chinese citizens from exercising their human rights to choose the way they want to live their lives rather than some made up masculine "uberm-man" of the CCP.
- iszomer 5y ago"Steam has been banned in China" reads differently than the article's original title: "Steam Has Reportedly Been Banned In China". FFS, get it right the first time. Initial impressions went from: * "Oh really? Not likely but okay..", clicks thread * Fast-reads comments top to bottom "fuck, what is this.." * Reads actual article, "God damnit."
- Leary 5y agohttps://twitter.com/Stutsies/status/1474748979326111751?s=20 https://twitter.com/Stutsies/status/1474748979326111751?s=20 Looks like it's a DNS attack, not a ban.
- lionkor 5y agoAlmost 6.5 billion people in the world excluding china, and I don't think a single one should care.
- imapeopleperson 5y agoChina does this, then gets their panties in a bunch when the US bans goods made with slave labor.
- livinglist 5y agoAs a Chinese who moved to U.S. couple years ago... I will never move back to China if there's no sign of democratization.
- silexia 5y agoXi Jinping has turned China into a nightmare dictatorship. Ethically, why do any companies want to do business there? Every business that goes into China gets it's IP stolen, it's new business entities stolen, etc. Why would anyone want to do business there period? I do no business with anyone or any company in China with my company.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Xi Jinping has turned China into a nightmare dictatorship. That...seems to be giving him too much credit. Not saying that China under Xi isn't a nightmare dictatorship, just that if it is, he either didn't make it that way or didn't have far to go to get there. > Every business that goes into China gets it's IP stolen, it's new business entities stolen, etc. That description has been being made of China longer than Xi has been in power, probably from a few days after the initial euphoria of Communist China opening up to Western business wore off.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoChina liberalized a bit under Hu, with the pullbacks liberties only beginning after the 2008 olympics. Xi…as a child of the cultural revolution who seems to have nostalgic feelings for it for some reason, was a huge step back. He is also china’s first leader who is monolingual and skipped most of his college education (having a degree handed to him after the cultural revolution ended). It’s weird. People forget china’s rollercoaster with liberalization in recent history, with China opening up dramatically in the late 80s before a huge pullback due to Tiananmen Square, there was also a movement in the late 70s that gained a lot of traction before being quashed. The pullback after the 2008 olympics has just lasted longer than the previous ones.
- throwaway_me 5y agoI honestly (no flamewar intended) wonder if the people of China (the majority of its regular citizens) suddenly decided that they're actually not happy with where the country is going, could they successfully make a change in government? Or is the power grip (+ available technology) of the powers that be (Xi and co) already too strong as to make that impossible, i.e. beyond the point of no return? I am asking because, putting China aside, other countries seem to be headed in a similar direction if are not outright copying what China's been doing during the last years.