Steam Global Appears Banned in China
Steam’s global version seems to have been banned in China. The good news is that its Chinese version seems unaffected at the moment. The bad news is that many gamers may have to use a VPN to get around the firewall from the government.
“Steam has been banned in China,” said one gamer. “The store has been included in the wall list along with the community.”
Being part of this said list indicates that the Chinese government is barring entry to the website for anyone who is using a Chinese ISP. At the moment, it remains unclear why they made this decision. It is also unknown if they consulted Valve about what was going to happen, or if they gave any warning ahead of time.
As mentioned, the Chinese version remains accessible within the country. However, it only has a limited library of 103 games. This is such a small fraction of the more than 110,000 games included in Steam Global.
A known data miner first shared on social media a list of all of the websites that China has blocked. “The website domain for Steam has been blocked in China 8 hours ago,” the leaker wrote. Others quickly went online to verify if the website is, indeed, blocked. And lo and behold, it certainly is not accessible in all parts of the country.
The gaming community has brought up a possibility that this whole situation may only be a result of an error or a coordinated attack. Some sources claim that this could just be the result of a DNS attack, and not a deliberate ban.
Although this move is a surprise to the gaming public, it somewhat fits with the pattern of the government’s recent actions around video games in the past year. The Chinese government shut down Fortnite just this November. All children can only have three hours of gaming every week. Plus, they also banned all forms of cryptocurrency.
Games had to be free of elements that are anti-Chinese before they got the greenlight for development. Two months after these restrictions, not a single game got an approval.
What do you think of this move? Let us know in the comments below.