Chinese Steam only has 53 games

Steam is out now in China, and if you thought it would give Chinese gamers instant access to the weird, wonderful, and sometimes deeply offensive depths of the service’s catalog, well lol, of course no.

At the time of publishing this customized and localized version of Valve’s store, only 53 games are available, with the main ones being Counter strike and DOTA 2. That’s all. If you visit the store and click on “all games” you can see it all in one screenshot.

Why this gap? As PC player report, this is because in order to be released on an official Chinese storefront, the games must have been certified by the government, and since most games would fail this process (for content and cultural reasons as much as for anything else), this explains the decrease (for reference, there is more 20,000 items available on Steam for us).

Oh, and there aren’t any forums or other community features either, which means there’s nowhere to go to complain about bugs and errors, although for some reason the opinions of Steam users are excluded:

If you want to head over there and check it out, marvel at how sparse it all is, or just want to see what our own Steam looked like in 2008, it’s accessible to international users. Here.