No universal but I'm very much anti valve as they are among the few who continue to do business in Russia.
- Young male angst has no shortage of outlets. Sports, both extreme and normal, tons of existing media, pirated media, blowing stuff up, etc. Taking away Steam accounts likely isn't going to turn them into revolutionaries.
- In response the existing comments from Russians, that could be selection bias. Many of them could be commenting normally or not at all. After all, most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people.
- Part of the problem in Russia is extreme media bias/propaganda. Further isolating them from foreign contact and influences can only make that worse and reinforce the narrative that everyone else is out to get them.
Wow man cool it with the antisemitic remarks.
Whatever there is, there will be abuses of it, so yeah, many would just use the "opium" part of Steam. But there's another aspect of it that would still get imported, and that's any of the narratives that differ from the propaganda they are subjected to. With Steam specifically, they'd be exposed to titles like This War of Mine, and international communities where they'd experience that nobody gives a fuck about them being Russian, or even find it cool, despite the prevalent anti-Western propaganda in their own media.
And that all, I think, is worth more than sanctioning it.
Also, you know what really provides bread and circuses? Populist bullshit such as "Putin banning LGBT propaganda". Nothing better to take the minds off of pressing issues like further harming a marginalized group.
https://news.yahoo.com/vladimir-putin-bans-lgbt-propaganda-1...
The world is moving to regional blocks -- a Western block of North America and Europe, a Eurasian block of Russia/India/Iran/Middle-East/China, and the loyalties of Africa/Latin America are where the wars for influence will be fought, with Africa tilting toward Eurasia and Latin America tilting toward the West. Other battle grounds would be marginal areas like Southeast Asia/Pacific Islands and in Europe the balkans. In that context, it makes no sense for the Eurasian block to allow a business to operate domestically from an enemy block. Why on earth would you let them influence your population? For the same reason, Eurasian influence operations are being banned in the West, from Confucian Institutes to Sputnik News.
The main entrypoints to a block will be those nations that have sufficiently rigid control over their domestic populations to feel free with enemy dependencies -- that would be the US and China, both with impressive soft power and sophisticated information control regimes. That is why US made films that are shown in China often have to have different scenes in them - sometimes shot with different endings -- and there are strict limits. China has their own system of deboosting content and their own troll farms. Same for any kind of internet presence and also video games and other media. Likewise, the US has a sophisticated system of banning and other soft "deboosting" of views that run counter to official regime narratives. There is a whole industry to identify counter-narrative views and brand them as "misinformation" that must be rooted out. Russia has a much less sophisticated information space defense system for this, and much less soft power, so for them outright bans and blocks are the only viable option, and this was given to them by the West on a platter. Amazing self-own.