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Steam troubles in China raise concerns that a ban is comingThe full story of what’s happening is hazy
The full story of what’s happening is hazy
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Top 12 Best Survival Games to Play on PC
Steam is not outright down in China, mind. Access seems intermittent, sometimes not loading, sometimes loading slowly.Game Developer(the site formerly known ha-ha-hilariously as Gamasutra) relay reports that many users are able to get on Steam, they just might have to retry or wait a few minutes. You can see the inconsistency yourself with Great Firewall testing tools; whilesomequickly declare it’s blocked (stoking belief in a ban),otherswith more patience might show you it loads sometimes, or after a long delay.
Chinese authorities hardly display a public list of banned websites, so people are left guessing what’s going on. They’re known to use a variety of methods to block access too, as well as often interfere with sites and services rather than outright blocking them. All of which means, we don’t know for certain what’s going on right now. But many assume it’s a first step in cracking down on Steam, attempting to push people onto the censored local version.
While precise numbers on Steam’s popularity in China are elusive, you can infer a lot from the fact that Simplified Chinese is the second most popular language on Steam, after English.Valve’s statssay almost 25% of users are using Simplified Chinese. That’s a huge number of people facing potentially losing access to games (or forced to use workarounds like VPNs), and a big financial concern for developers.
