Reports of a Chinese ban on Steam’s international client appear to have been a false alarm, but it’s raised more questions about the country potentially blocking the widely-used video game storefront.

Late on Christmas Eve, word spread via social media and Reddit that Steam, an all-digital shop for PC games that’s owned and operated by the Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve Software, had seemingly and suddenly been added to China’s national ban list.

That would prevent anyone using a Chinese internet service provider from accessing Steam, which would have sunk China’s independent games development scene overnight.

Hours later, on a second look, it turned out that the ban wasn’t a ban. Instead, an unknown party seems to have launched a Domain Name System (DNS) attack against Steam’s servers.

Vladyslav Tsypljak, CCO and co-founder of the Taiwan-based video game publisher Neon Doctrine, said his team in China was completely blocked out for a few hours but later regained access to Steam. A similar hack was reportedly used a few years ago at around the same time of the year, which coincides with Steam’s annual Winter Sale.

No one has taken credit for the apparent Chinese DNS attack on Steam at time of writing, but right now, it’s probably safest to assume that some troll thought it’d be funny to bring the service down during one of the highest-profile events on Steam’s calendar.

We’ve reached out to Valve and will update this story when we hear back.

This was a big deal over Christmas weekend, as the DNS attack initially appeared to be a total government crackdown on Steam. The confusion was understandable, as many developers and analysts in the space have been waiting for this particular hammer to fall for most of 2021.

China, for whatever reason, hasn’t banned Steam yet, unlike other international websites such as Facebook or YouTube. Chinese users can’t directly access Steam’s community forums, but otherwise have access to the storefront.

Users have reported that the client has additional restrictions in China, including throttled download speeds. Some games are still ostensibly available for sale through Steam in China, but cannot be successfully downloaded due to government filters. It’s common for Chinese players to resort to buying product keys from resellers or changing their region in order to get around the government’s efforts at censorship.

Despite all of that, China has come to host a small but growing community of independent video game developers, who bring their games to the international market through Steam and, in so doing, bypass Chinese media regulation.

China has shown that it’s willing to take additional direct action against content on Steam — the Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games almost got hounded out of existence in 2019 over a mistakenly-included image in its horror game Devotion that called Xi Jinping a moron — but it’s otherwise allowed Chinese citizens to continue to use the service, albeit in a heavily censored form, rather than banning it outright.

Valve’s Dota 2 is an esports favorite in China. (Valve Software image)

There are several Western games with big followings in China, such as Valve’s own Dota 2, but it’s not really clear why Steam has been allowed to slip through the cracks in China’s Internet censorship.

Tsypljak said he thinks Steam’s international client will be slowly phased out of China.

“In the last few years, the rhetoric has changed,” Tsypljak said. “The government is pushing the ‘video games are like heroin addiction‘ stories. Another one was that gaming is hurting kids’ eyesight, which was one of the reasons for the law that limited playtime for underage children.”

That’s contributed to a general feeling in the Chinese and Taiwanese indie gaming communities that the writing’s on the wall. Valve launched a specifically Chinese version of Steam in February, in partnership with the Chinese publisher Perfect World Entertainment, which features a curated list of games that have been approved for launch by the Chinese government.

Its existence has been taken as an implicit warning by Chinese indies that sooner or later, their tenuous links to the international market via Steam will be severed.

This is also a significant concern for developers outside of China, as the Chinese market makes up a significant number of overall video game sales worldwide. Some Western indies, in response to the news on Twitter, have noted that as much as 30% of their revenue comes from players in China.

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