Steam is now officially available in China; the Chinese version of the platform has around 40 gaming titles and another 10 or so listed as coming soon
Mitchell Clark / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch closes a long loop: Valve first committed to bringing Steam to China with publisher Perfect World back in its 2018 partnership announcement, with no launch date attached. What has arrived is a deliberately small storefront — around 40 live titles plus roughly 10 listed as coming soon — a catalog sized by what regulators will approve rather than by what Valve can host.
The thin launch list fits the approval pattern in the related coverage: after a nine-month freeze, regulators only resumed clearing titles from Tencent and NetEase in early 2019, and the same bottleneck reappeared years later when approvals dipped before recovering to 105 and then 115 titles per month. A licensed Steam China lives or dies inside that cadence.
First-order effects
- Chinese players now have an official, locally operated Steam through Perfect World, but with a catalog of roughly 40 titles — a fraction of what the global client offers — so content access, not price, is the immediate trade-off.
Second-order effects
- Valve now runs two Steams in one market: the compliant Chinese storefront competes against its own global platform, giving regulators a lever to push players toward the licensed version over time.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, foreign platforms entering China accept catalog-by-approval as the entry cost, mirroring how Tencent and NetEase titles have moved only at the pace of the regulator's monthly approval batches — and the January wave of 115 approvals shows that pace itself is the policy signal.
The trend: Global game platforms are splitting into regulator-approved national storefronts whose catalogs are set by approval cadence rather than by the platform's own library.