China bans global version of Steam

Steam Global seems to have been banned in China, according to a report from TheGamer. Only the Chinese version of Steam remains accessible in the country, which currently offers a limited library of just 103 games — a very small fraction of the over 110,000 games that Steam Global has at this time of writing.

Reliable Fortnite leaker and data miner Ricky Owens first noticed the ban and tweeted out a screenshot of what appears to be Steam on a list of blocked websites in China. Upon entering  into a special tool that checks whether a site is blocked in China, the tool indicates that Steam has been blocked in all parts of the country — as for , however, the tool says the domain is still available.

China, for whatever reason, hasn’t banned Steam yet, unlike other international websites such as Facebook or YouTube. However, the ban leaves Chinese gamers with access to just Steam China, which first launched in February of this year. In addition to having far fewer games — with the only mainstream titles being Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 — Steam China also comes without any community features, including the Steam Workshop, Community Market, discussion forums, and more. The main possible reason is because many games on Steam were not officially approved by the Ministry of Culture of China, who is responsible for granting certificate for video game published within the country.

Users have reported that the localised version has additional restrictions in China, including throttled download speeds. Some games are still ostensibly available for sale through Steam in China, but cannot be successfully downloaded due to government filters. It’s common for Chinese players to resort to buying product keys from resellers or changing their region in order to get around the government’s efforts at censorship.

Despite all of that, China has come to host a growing community of independent video game developers, who bring their games to the international market through Steam and, in so doing, bypass Chinese media regulation.

China’s apparent ban on Steam Global is a rough way to end a year of 2021 that the country has spent cracking down on gaming. In July, Tencent rolled out a facial recognition technology that scans kids’ faces to keep them in compliance with the 10 PM curfew that China set to prevent kids from gaming late at night. Just one month later, China implemented a new rule that restricts minors from playing games for more than three hours per week. China later banned Fortnite, even though the game was already heavily modified to comply with China’s strict rules.