Steam is now available in China, and if you’d think this would give Chinese players instant access to the weird, wonderful, and sometimes deeply offensive depths of the service’s catalog, well, lol, of course not.
At the time of posting this custom version, the localized version of the Valve showcase has only 53 games available, the main ones being Counter Strike and DOTA 2. This is. If you visit the store and click on “all games”, you can see everything in one screenshot.
Why the discrepancy? As PC Gamer report, is that in order to get a launch on an official Chinese showcase, you must have been government certificate and, most of the time, international games would fail this process (for content and cultural reasons, just like anything else), which explains the drop-off (for reference, there are over 20,000 articles available on Steam for us).
Oh, and also there are no forums or other community features, which means there is nowhere central to complain about mistakes and errors, although, for some reason, Steam user reviews are excluded from this:
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If you want to go there and check it out, marveling at the rarity of it all or just want to see what our own Steam looked like in 2008, it’s accessible to international users. Here.