Valve has been planning for a while that they will make a local, China version of Steam. However, the game developers in the country aren’t entirely happy about it.

Steam started getting traction in about 2015 in the country, which was just getting out of the console ban. (Which is why PC and mobile games became popular in China.) Gabe Newell’s digital store hasn’t been banned like other services and sites (Facebook, Google, Twitch, Twitter…), so Chinese players can easily access Grand Theft Auto V or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The indie developers can also thus go around the Chinese censorship and licensing process to even earn a living off Steam.

Steam has more than thirty thousand games. Steam’s Chinese version could launch with forty games or even less. That’s not a typo, mind you: we wrote 40. Last year, during Dota 2’s The International world tournament in Shanghai, neither Valve nor its Chinese partner, Perfect World, gave a clear answer about the international version of Steam remaining accessible in China after the local version launches. Valve wants everyone to access the games they already bought, but who knows what they can do against the Chinese Communist Party and its censors (who give out the licenses to have the games officially sold in the country)?

„Steam China is terrifying. It’s horrible. I’m not sure what it will be, but I hope players can still access international Steam,” an anonymous developer told PCGamer. „I would say 100 per cent of China’s indie scene is alive because of Steam,” another developer added. So they aren’t satisfied at all. No wonder.

Meanwhile, Steam has broken another record. Steam Database reports that on February 2, Steam had more than 18.8 million concurrent users. The exact figure is 18,537,490. However, there is one change. While two years ago (at the previous record), about seven million players were in a game, last week, only 5.8 million users were doing so. Perhaps they were browsing the games.

So Steam continues to be popular, but the Epic Games Store is providing competition.

Source: PCGamer, DualShockers

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