The Christmas weekend was a big surprise for Chinese players, who were unable to access the global Steam site.
Over the weekend, part of the PC gaming community witnessed one of the strangest disappearances. Indeed, the global Steam platform has not been accessible in China for a few days, and no one knows why. Concretely, it seems that this does not affect the Chinese version of the platform… which only offers a hundred games in the catalog. What anger the players.
Basically, Steam is blocked in China pic.twitter.com/552bej6vqA
– 🎄 Santa Ricky (@_FireMonkey) December 25, 2021
Using a tool that allows you to see sites blocked in the country, several users found that the global version of Steam was indeed blocked from the country. For the moment, therefore, players only have access to the Chinese version, released last February and much more restricted in terms of games. We also note the absence of community tools, and all the social part of the platform.
A government restriction?
As the Chinese government tightens the screw on the gaming industry in general, many have wondered if this is not part of the plan as well. So this would have been the most orderly restrictive measure to date, besides having restricted access to online games to just 3 hours per week for children and having censored some game characters.
However, it seems that the problem does not come from there. After several speculations on the origin of the disappearance, it would probably be due to an attack on the DNS servers. This one has obviously not been able to be foiled by Valve for the moment, and if this is indeed the cause of the blocking of the site, then the studio has not yet commented on the origin of the attack or even on the situation in general.
For the moment, therefore, players have no choice but to wait, or to turn to other platforms for PC games, temporarily or permanently.
