Steam is now available in China, and if you would think that Chinese gamers would immediately gain access to the strange, amazing, and sometimes deeply offensive depths of the service’s catalog, well, no, of course not.
At the moment this appropriate, localized version of Valve’s storefront has been posted, there are only 53 games available, with the most important Counter-Strike and DOTA 2. That’s it. If you visit the store and click on “all games”, you can see everything in a single screenshot.
Why the difference? As PC player report, this is because there should have been a game to get an release from an official Chinese storefront certified by the government, and since most international games would fail that process (for content and cultural reasons as much as anything else)), which explains the deduction (as a reference, there is more 20 000 items available on Steam for us).
Oh, and there are also no forums or other community functions, which means there is nowhere important to complain about bugs and errors, but for some reason Steam user reviews are excluded:
G / O Media can get a commission
If you want to go there and explore it, marvel at the sparsity of it all or just want to see what our very own Steam looks like in 2008, it’s accessible to international users. here.