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Video gaming
TechPolicy

China’s gaming crackdown: concerns about Steam ban heightened after Christmas connectivity issues

  • Chinese gamers complained on social media about intermittent connectivity issues with Steam, the world’s largest video game platform
  • Steam launched a China-only store this year, which has heightened concerns that the global store would finally be blocked by the country’s Great Firewall

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Chinese gamers became alarmed on Christmas Day when the popular Steam video game store was hit with intermittent outages, raising concerns that authorities had finally blocked it. Photo: Shutterstock
Ann Cao

Concerns that the world’s largest video game platform Steam was blocked in China on Christmas Day have spread on social media as gamers complained about issues connecting to the website days after it kicked off its popular year-end sale.

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Access to the store appears to be facing intermittent connectivity issues in different parts of mainland China, with some users saying they had no problems connecting. The government did not issue any announcements about Steam, nor did Valve Corp, the platform’s US-based owner.

“I was unable to open the platform through the local network, which returns the error code of 118,” wrote one user on the microblogging platform Weibo on Sunday, referencing the error for when a web page fails to load. The user added that the platform could still be accessed using a virtual private network (VPN), a common tool for circumventing internet censorship.

Many Chinese gamers have been expressing concerns that the global Steam platform would eventually be blocked by the Great Firewall since Valve announced three years ago that it was working on Steam China. That platform, which launched this year with the help of local Chinese video gaming partner Perfect World, remains accessible.

Chinese gaming communities have been discussing the issue since Saturday, when problems started for people trying to access Steampowered.com.

“The website is suspected of encountering intermittent blocking, which means it is blocked part of the time and [based on] location,” a user posted to HeyBox, a Chinese-language online video gaming community. “It is similar to how GitHub is blocked in China.”

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Microsoft-owned code-sharing site GitHub is another popular platform that has faced intermittent blocking in China. An outage in 2013 led to an outcry from programmers angry about being cut off from the important developer community for open-source software, and access was eventually restored.
The incident comes at the end of a year in which Beijing has instituted one of its harshest crackdowns on the video game industry. Its biggest move came in August, when it limited gaming time for people under 18 years old to just three hours most weeks – only between 8pm and 9pm on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and statutory holidays.
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