Steam is now available in China, and if you thought that would give Chinese gamers instant access to the weird, wonderful, and sometimes deeply insulting depths of the service’s catalog, well, no, of course not.
At the time this modified, localized version of Valve’s storefront was posted, there are only 53 games available, the most important of which are Counterattack and DOTA 2. That is it. If you visit the store and click on “all games”, you can see everything in one screenshot.
Why the discrepancy? As PC gamer report, it’s because to get a release on an official Chinese store, it must have been games certified by the government, and since most international games wouldn’t make it through that process (just as much for content and cultural reasons as anything else), that explains the drop-off (for reference, there are more than 20,000 items available to us on Steam).
Oh, and there are no forums or other community features either, which means there’s nowhere central to complain about bugs and errors, although for some reason Steam user reviews are excluded from this:
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If you want to go there to check it out, marvel at the scarcity of all this or just see what our own Steam looked like in 2008, it is accessible to international users here.