However, as reported in Vietnam.net, it's possible Steam has been taken down in Vietnam after local game developers complained about the scope and size of Steam's vast portfolio of games, claiming Vietnamese devs cannot compete with Steam's releases given they are subject to government approval and thousands of international games on Steam are not.
Citing it as "an injustice to domestic publishers", Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development "will die" if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games.
Based Vietnam protecting its domestic games industry from American capitalists. :)
TLDR: the online game monopolies of Vietnam complains that they can't extort the market share our Lord and Savior Gabe Newell rightfully earned," said one unhappy Steam user.
Steam users are so fucking insufferable. They hate all capitalist game companies except this one which they will eagerly lick the boot of.
Maybe I'm just ignorant to Steam's potentially anti-competitive business practices(?), but to me it just seems like there's a lack of credible competition. I don't know the situation in Vietnam specifically, but Steam's arguably main competitor Epic Games Store still has to use every tactic at its disposal to try and win even a tiny slice of market share. Like exclusivity contracts (which are definitely anti-competitive and anti-consumer), and literally handing out games for free. Yet, people still choose to use Steam instead. Not arguing that Steam treats developers great or anything, but I don't really think they go out of their way to shut competing platforms out of the market. Would love to be corrected on this if I'm way off base, though.
A common reason cited by g*mers for only using Steam is that they "want to have all their games in one place". They will literally never switch to anything else, no matter how good it is, if the majority of their "owned" games can only be accessed through Steam.
That's just a service issue, though. Steam can import CD keys from games that were bought outside of their ecosystem, I don't know why a competing service couldn't do the same with purchased Steam games (other than contracts with publishers etc.). I've at some point used most of the game stores that exist and I'll be honest they all kinda suck. They don't even give me the impression that they're trying to be serious competition.
We already kind of see that, albeit in reverse. Many Steam games require third party launchers, almost as a kind of desperate attempt to get them installed on users' computers.
I can definitely agree with that. EGS in particular is frankly shameful for a company that constantly rakes in obscene amounts of money.