Epitome via Valve

It appears that Steam, Valve'due south market-dominating PC gaming platform, has been banned in China as of today. Avid Chinese gamers can at least take solace in the cognition that the Chinese version of the storefront remains agile, but the underwhelming library of simply over 100 games may prove petty comfort in comparison to the tens of thousands of titles lost.

The news was shared past an anonymous Redditor, among others, early this morning, who discovered that the Steam's website domain (store.steampowered.com) had been added to the Chinese national ban list, disallowment entry to the site for anyone using a Chinese ISP. It's unclear at present why the action has been taken or whether Valve was consulted or warned alee of fourth dimension. The Chinese version of Steam (store.steamchina.com) remains unaffected at the time of writing.

There is even a possibility the whole thing may take been an error or a co-ordinated attack: TheGamer's Stacey Henley updated her story with the caveat, "Some conflicting reports merits this is the outcome of a DNS attack and not a deliberate ban." Still, whatever the reason, many Chinese gamers may well find themselves needing to use a VPN to get around the regime-imposed firewall.