China blocks Steam international version, gamers can only play games with domestic Steam version

According to information from many sources, the international Steam version has been blocked in China. At the time this article was published, only the Chinese version of Steam existed in the country of billions of people; The Chinese domestic Steam version contains only 103 games, too few compared to the current list of more than 110,000 games on the international Steam version.

Ricky Owens , the famous source of Fortnite game content leaks, was the first to discover the incident. In his Twitter post, Mr. Owens posted a photo showing Steam on the list of banned websites.

Using Comparitech’s Chinese blocked domain detector , we get the same result. However, the domain name “store.steamchina.com” belongs to the Chinese domestic version of Steam is still online.

It seems that Chinese players can only access Steam through the new domestic version launched in February last year. Steam China still owns big online games like DotA and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but lacks many other blockbuster titles as well as some basic Steam functions such as Workshop, Market or player content. self-supply.

It seems that this is another attempt to limit Chinese gamers from playing games in moderation. In July, Tencent announced facial recognition technology to make sure kids don’t break curfews or play games outside of allowed hours.

Just a month after that time, the Chinese government enacted a law restricting children from playing games, allowing them to play games only for about 3 hours a week . Even the hit game Fortnite has been banned in China, although the game has been heavily modified to fit the strict laws in the host country.

Steam has not made an official statement on the matter.