I just had an interesting situation. I stumbled upon a game on Steam and I liked it. So much so that I downloaded a demo and started playing.
7 minutes into the game and like 2 minutes into actual gameplay after all the cutscenes I notice something that makes my spidey-sense tingle. There was an object labeled in cyrillic.

This label made me question the origins of the game. I googled the name of the publisher and found their website. On there it says that they are located in Cyprus. You know, the home country of many legitimate game studios such as uhhh… ermmm… I mean, maybe they exist, but I am drawing a blank right now. Right, where were we? On the same result page there also was a link to a Ukrainian website warning people that these are russians, just hiding under the guise of their HQ address. Which makes sense when you are a russian game studio and you want to look as as innocent as it is humanly possible while still employing people from russia and letting their taxes fund the war.

In the same article I found a Steam curator that issues warnings for games that are openly or discreetly made by russians. Which is nice. I subscribed to this curator.

By the way, a small tangent: Steam’s UX when it comes to the curators is just terrible. I had a page with the curator open in my browser, and in the desktop app I had to find the curator from scratch through the non-intuitive process of opening a game’s page, where one of my currently subscribed curators would have left a review and from their page going to general “Curators” page and searching for the curator I need.

I read through the list of games. Honestly it is hilariously bad. It has maybe a dozen games that may be considered interesting, but most of them are either hits from the yester-decade or quick cash-grabs made exclusively to cash in on a meme or a social trend. They are cheap and even not knowing they are made in russia I don’t think I would buy them.

Which brings me to the last thing I have thought about the matter. Choice.

Specifically, Humble Choice, to which I am subscribed since its first month. I am concerned that they might choose to overlook some of the questionable origins of the games and some russian game might eventually end up in my subscription.

Granted, I could just not activate it and pretend it’s not there, but in my opinion that would be wasteful. I pay money for my Humble Choice, therefore I should be able to activate all games and play them without the need to sift through them and argue with Humble’s helpful, yet slow support agents.

Next time I write about gaming, I will tell the story of my clash with Ubisoft.