China has blocked the international version of the Steam client

During all these years, Steam's official international client has been working in China in the "gray zone" mode: the platform did not have official permits from the country's authorities, but no one signed the ban. It seems that now everything has changed: many users report that Steam domain addresses have been included in the powerful Chinese firewall. 

At the moment, the Steam store and community in China are coming to an end. There is also a high probability that Steamworks, a matchmaking service, also went to bed with him. If this is true, then it turns out that China is almost completely disconnected from the international Steam. 

Valve foresaw this path of events, and therefore, together with Perfect World, created a local client of the platform - Steam China, which has all the necessary permissions. The local client has disabled social features such as the community center and activity bar, as well as reduced the game catalog by a hundred times. At the time of writing, there are 63 products available on Chinese Steam. 

The official ban could hit Steam activity hard. Chinese is the second most popular language and is set at 22.11% of all users.