Merry Christmas, thought the Chinese Communist Party: now we hear that Steam’s international domain is unavailable in the country.

It has emerged on Twitter that the international version of the Steam store is not available to Chinese users, so they have to use the local version, which is much fewer games as the local censors can monitor it; the international version is safe from them, so even games that are against the party line could be accessed by players…

According to Comparitech, the Steampowered domain has indeed fallen victim to the great Chinese firewall, meaning that without any tricks (and it’s not that easy to get around it with a VPN either…) Gabe Newell’s international game store has to say goodbye. The local version was launched in China in February this year; Valve established it in partnership with Perfect World.

The Chinese edition of Steam has just been described as more limited, which is no coincidence: this version is fully compliant with the rules and regulations for Internet use and video games. For example, you need a licence from the censors (i.e. the government has to accept it…) to have the game on this platform, which isn’t necessary for the international edition. And that’s why Steam China launched with only 53 (we didn’t typo: fifty-three!) games. There are no forums, no Steam Workshop, and the marketplace is missing from this version. Sad.

But here, we must also consider the tweets from SteamDB. The Steam client is not affected so that Chinese players can launch it without a problem. On some Akamai IP addresses, the store and its API subdomains encounter a connection reset, which is typical for the big Chinese firewall, and it has also happened with GitHub. The other subdomains (e.g. those of partners) are working, so we don’t know if the Chinese censorship is still in its unrefined state (i.e. the client will be blocked) or if there is some technical glitch.

Knowing the situation in China (one hour of gaming a day for young people, real name required to register accounts for games), it would not be surprising if this case escalates.

Source: WCCFTech