China’s taking over the world. It’s getting the biggest economy, it's got its paws all over Hollywood, and an increasing number of game companies are finding themselves owned – either fully or in-part—by ultra-wealthy Chinese companies. And if you thought that at least Steam might be safe from the red menace across the sea, you’d be mistaken: because according to Valve’s December 2019 Steam Hardware and Software survey, Simplified Chinese has officially overtaken English as the largest language demographics on Steam.
But there’s a catch.
This survey (which you can opt-out of by the way) collects basic system confirmation data on a portion of Steam’s 90 million monthly active users, which is logical enough for a game client to collect – you wanna know what kind of rigs most people have. One of the things that they check for is your Steam Client’s language setting, and typically, English represents around 30 to 40 percent of users. But in December, Simplified Chinese represented 37.8 percent of users – while English was down to 30.4.
See, here’s the thing: since the selection of users is random, it could be that December’s results (which is the first time this has happened, by the way) disproportionately grabbed Chinese PCs out of sheer chance. Plus, Valve has reported a bug where Asian internet café PCs were able to fill out the survey multiple times, which could obviously impact the scores.
All that said, however, China is still undeniably a growing marketplace for Steam. For example, Sands of Salzaar, an open-world top-down RPG in the vein of Kenshi is now a Steam top seller, despite the fact it’s exclusively available in Chinese. Scroll of Taiwu, as well, was extremely popular last year, and that was a Chinese baby through and through.
This is almost certainly going to be a point of contention in the very near future. But for now – it’s just a cool fact.
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