What other instances of Valve not putting a game on their store has there been?
Mainly game-shaped objects, games that exploit Steam cards, games with inappropriate depictions of minors. These are the golden rules as per the Steamworks site:
What you shouldn't publish on Steam said:
- Adult content that isn't appropriately labeled and age-gated
- Libelous or defamatory statements
- Content you don't own or have adequate rights to
- Content that violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be available
- Content that exploits children in any way
- Applications that modify customer's computers in unexpected or harmful ways, such as malware or viruses
- Applications that fraudulently attempts to gather sensitive information, such as Steam credentials or financial data (e.g. credit card information)
I can see how no. 4 might be the relevant one here. Though, honestly, with a lot of rules in let's say more authoritarian regimes being formulated very vaguely so as to have a wide berth and an utterly subjective application, I can think of a bunch of games that if they were prominently featured in said countries' news or had some kind of relationship to the political opposition (however tangential), they might suddenly become contentious.
Games that center around blasphemy or non-heteronormative relationships, for example, might become a problem in Russia. There are also explicit laws limiting foreign funding of political movements (look up "foreign agent law" Russia), so a game like the one discussed here that intends to use proceeds for domestic political activism would likely be out of the question. If you'd interpret such laws broadly, you could pull an argument out of your ass against every tenth game on Steam. Like the old laws against anti-Soviet agitation and counter-revolutionary activities, it can be used against anything and anyone. Except now mass incarcerations aren't in vogue anymore. The goal of these kinds of governments isn't necessarily to censor everything, but to get everyone to tip-toe around certain controversial subjects and exercise self-censorship, because there is simply too much information that goes around too quickly to censor it all "manually". Fear and economic incentives keep the process rolling on its own. And we see it working exactly as planned right here. It's Valve who does the dirty work by making this (non-)decision and catching heat for it, not the Chinese government.
