When the war in Ukraine started, I’ve spent some time making a game reflecting on absurdity of propaganda. After spending $100 on the usual submission fee, Valve decided to stonewall my game, Belarus Simulator, behind their review process, without any deadlines or reasonable communication.
The Background
As a russian-speaking citizen of Latvia (one out of three Baltic states that share a border with Russian federation), I looked critically at what is happening at our big neighbor’s territory when it came to internal politics and political repressions, but I never perceived it as an external military threat to Europe, not even after the events happening in Crimea in 2014. Of course, that all changed on February 24, 2022. Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine left everyone here wondering: “what if we are next” and “would NATO risk a full-scale confrontation over a small country.” The crimes that were happening in Bucha and Irpen were especially painful to observe because in Latvia the similar atrocities have been done by the soviets in 1940, when the occupation by the Soviet Union has started.
Dealing with it
After working some shifts in Ukrainian refugee centre and seeing all the victims of this unprovoked war, my sorrow was accumulating day by day. The normality of life that was there is no longer possible. My feelings aside, I had no idea how refugees from Ukraine manage in this heartbreaking situation.
One way to deal with my internal crises in Life has always been game development. Therefore it took me a week to make the baseline of https://store.steampowered.com/app/1990760/Belarus_Simulator_Preemptive_Strike/ – my take on what was going on and how the system of intricate lies and compromising brought us to where we are today.
The game follows a simple formula: what if everything that propaganda tells us is true? Would the illusion shatter naturally? If so – when? It does not feature the war itself (unlike Death from Above – a Ukrainian drone operator simulator which did not meet any resistance when being published).
Belarus Simulator features a simple management system with new perceived threats appearing as time goes by. The player has to use the resource allocation via sliders in order to be dealing with them. The game features my terrible hand-drawn graphics and rather simple resource management mechanics.
What happened afterwards was a Kafkaesque system of stonewalling by Valve, devoid of any observable logic.
The Process
The first hurdle was during the page approval process: before approving the page, I was asked to provide a playable copy of the game. This has never happened for any other games that I’ve made. A few days later, the page actually have gone live. This is when the problems with the review process started.
The usual build review did not happen: instead, it was replaced by this message.
Clicking on “here” started a usual support ticket: after trying to actually ask what was going on and getting vague replies, the support ticket eventually disappeared. The link now leads to a closed support ticket. There is no way the game can be reviewed. It has been like that since August 2022.
What surprised me the most is not the fact that Valve does not want to see something like that at their store. It’s the different thing: they essentially stonewalled and ignored me. Rather than saying “no, we don’t want this” privately, they kept ghosting me and not answering both my emails and support tickets at all. My requests for a brief call (in case they did not want to put rejection in writing) were dismissed. The ignoring happened with at least 3 new support requests that I’ve kept opening every 3 months or so.
Any other ways?
I’ve reached out to three people at Valve personally: my main company Steam rep, an employee that I’ve met at GDC in 2019 and Gabe Newell. I got a brief response from my steam rep essentially saying “I can’t the influence review process, if you don’t like it – we can remove the page entirely.” Afterwards he started ghosting me. Everyone else avoided answering me entirely.
After this, I could not get any new replies, no matter how much I asked:
In the end, none of my emails got answered.
Why am I writing this?
Most of the time, I’ve been feeling unsafe: I can’t really go public with this because Valve can easily close my accounts as a silent means of retaliation (both my shitposting account and my main company account – even if I run both of them as separate entities). Still, I don’t think I did anything wrong. If anything, I should be angry at the system that ignores me and allows this to drag for more than 1.5 years.
Even if you look at this practically: imagine you’ve ordered a package from Amazon and paid $100 for it. It does not arrive – what would you do? Now imagine that support keeps stonewalling you and plainly ignoring your messages after you’ve paid the $100 store submission fee.
Knowing that Valve did not release a statement even during the George Floyd and BLM protests, I never expected them to pick a side here too. What I _did_ expect is to not be blocked by trying to voice _my_ protest to Russian aggression and help gather some donation money while doing it. Realistically speaking, the game would have been played by 5 people tops, so I don’t understand why they stonewalled it behind the “review process” that allegedly lasts for 1.5 years. Meanwhile, games like Angry Putin apparently get published without any obstacles.
What’s Next?
I’ve completely lost my will to make the games for some time, but I have been recovering gradually. I’m not sure which was more painful to me: the fact that my game won’t get published or that the company that I looked up since I was a child essentially threw away our 7 years of relationship and decided to ghost me. You can say that corporations are not people, but I always found it as a cheap excuse: behind every screen there is a living person. Valve has the power to change the world. You can say that this is not their responsibility to do so. I’d say that this is _everyone’s_ responsibility. But in any case: even by doing nothing, Valve is picking their side.
The war in Ukraine is far from over. Please consider donating if you can.