Summary
For the first time inSteam’s history, more people are playing games using Simplified Chinese than English on the platform. Released in 2003,Steamis the largest PC gaming platform in the world, and it is widely used in most countries, including China.
Steam has a long and tumultuous history in China. While the PC gaming platform has been popular in the country for several years, it has previously struggled with China’s strict regulations for the gaming industry, which led toSteam being banned from China in 2021. Right now, Chinese gamers have two options for using the platform. Either they can use Steam China, which is legal but does not have a wide variety of games, or they can access the international version of the service using a VPN. So, despite the country having over 1.42 billion inhabitants, these legal roadblocks currently hamper Steam’s popularity in China.
Now, gamers have spotted that there are more people on Steam using Chinese than English as their language, a first in the history of the gaming platform. According to data taken from Steam, 35.03% of all gamers use Simplified Chinese, while 31.17% use English. These languages are followed by Russian with 8.49%, Spanish (Spain) with 3.86%, and Portuguese (Brazil) with 3.43%. In the comments of the post, gamers theorized that this could be related to the release ofBlack Myth: Wukong.
Black Myth: Wukongaffecting these numbers would not be surprising. Developed by the Chinese studio Game Science,Black Myth: Wukongsold over 10 million unitsin only three days, becoming one of the biggest game releases of 2024.
Black Myth: Wukongis largely inspired by a popular Chinese story,Journey to the West, and has been a hit in China. For instance, recent data shows thatChinese Steam traffic increased by 50%duringBlack Myth: Wukong’s release.
Last year, for example, a survey focused on the hardware used by gamers stated that52.70% of all Steam PC gamers used Simplified Chineseas their language of choice. At the time, however, this information was not entirely believed, as Valve previously had problems tracking this kind of data, which was considered to be overall less reliable than the information that surfaced this week.
Steam
Steam is a digital video game storefront and program developed by Valve that allows gamers to purchase, play, and mod their titles all through one convenient program.
