Steam is Finally Coming To China But Chinese Gamers Don't Want It (abacusnews.com) 138
Valve officially announced this week the arrival of Steam China in Shanghai. But Chinese gamers are telling the PC gaming platform to "get lost!" From a report: One of the most upvoted comments wrote, "Steam China get out of China." It's important to point out that gamers are directing their anger at Steam China, not Steam. In fact, Chinese gamers love Steam... the global version of it, anyway. There are an estimated 30 million Chinese users playing games on the platform -- games which otherwise aren't officially available in China.
But that's exactly why they fear the launch of Steam China, which is a joint venture between Valve and Chinese company Perfect World. Gamers worry that not only will Steam China be a heavily censored platform with a much smaller lineup of titles; worse yet, it might also be the trigger for the government to ban the global version of Steam.
But that's exactly why they fear the launch of Steam China, which is a joint venture between Valve and Chinese company Perfect World. Gamers worry that not only will Steam China be a heavily censored platform with a much smaller lineup of titles; worse yet, it might also be the trigger for the government to ban the global version of Steam.
Not again.... (Score:1)
Re: Goodbye, my Chinese friends. (Score:1)
Lorelei.
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Wrong tree to take a piss on. With the ongoing crackdown on gaming in China, it's almost certain that Steam is getting banned on the Great Firewall of China in near future. Valve simply sees the writing on the wall and is attempting to keep at least some of the market share.
Valve isn't the cause here. It's the victim desperately trying to adapt to the changing environment before it's killed off by the government entirely.
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I guess you also blame German Jews for the holocaust?
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You're not wrong. But that's not how human psyche works. At all. You may as well expect ants to value the individual ant or suggest that sea cucumbers should fly.
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That didn't go so well for them in the Warsaw ghetto. Still the right option though.
China is a different situation. Many people in China have survived the cultural revolution and seen their children attain a middle class lifestyle. By US or European standards it's horribly compromised but by Chinese standards this is a massive step forward.
They're more likely to celebrate than revolt. Change has happened and it's possible that it'll continue to happen. The current Chinese Government's actions on the Interne
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Oh, and comically I forgot to mention your curious choice of number.
I think you'll find that rather more than 180k Jewish people prematurely lost their lives between 1938 and 1945. While precise numbers are constantly debated I think 5-6 million is a reasonable estimate.
Wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So the Chinese citizens' solution to stopping government censorship and overreach is to try and get a foreign company to stop a product that works with their government.
Seems like the wrong target to attack. How about revolting against your government instead?
Re:Wrong problem (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not true. Most Chinese I know like their culture and history. Their current government is scary, they know it, and thats just The Way It Is, and they have many friends and family still in China. I asked my ex why there was no change if most people feel repression on some level... She said to me, how can you change the moon? And if you changed it, would it be better? Could you protect your family if the moon fell from the sky? Leave the moon there.
Re: Wrong problem (Score:1)
Aren't we all?
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Their current government is scary
I believe this is not a sentiment you will only find in China. It happens everywhere people find out that government isn't really about them, but about what's good for the people in government. Go ask in Venezuela, in Iran, in the UK or even in the US. You will get pretty much that same answer.
Re: Wrong problem (Score:2)
Which is why America some what works. Every few years the core of the government changes. A constant change which then gets stuck doing the same things.
It is why we need term limits for Congress. To let them be changed more often, and to not let Gerry mandered districts dictate the future.
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Are you an idiot? It doesn't matter which party is subverting democracy...
Who cares which side of the same coin is cheating with Gerrymandering currently? It needs to stop.
Fuck Republicans and fuck democrats. Term limits for all government offices!
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Go ask in Venezuela, in Iran, in the UK or even in the US. You will get pretty much that same answer.
{Sesame Street}Two of these things are not like the other ... two of these things are not quite the same ... {/Sesame Street}
Every place has problems, but no, the UK and US are not totalitarian dictatorships, outside of the fever dreams of overexcited political junkies.
Re:Wrong problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Most Chinese people in general have no idea about their culture and history because Cultural Revolution has actually happened. I've no idea who your Chinese friends are, but chances are, they're not from actual PRC. As in not even raised there, much less living there, which seems to be what you're implying.
And there's well in excess of billion of Chinese people living in PRC, who very much support their government in most things, because state propaganda is near absolute.
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It wiped out enough for overwhelming majority of the culture to have been wiped out. One has to be an incredible apologist for Mao to pretend otherwise.
It's obvious that Chinese culture will continue to be permeated by the Confucian principles, such as societal harmony. But such base principles permeate all societies of East Asia, and culture is built on top of them. And in case of China, if you want to find Chinese culture, there's really only one place left where it survived. ROC.
In mainland China, it's p
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Well, considering that no one still knows even what the approximate number of deaths has been as a result of Mao's policies, it's rather hard to produce a reliable account that we could evaluate for trustworthiness in the first place.
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You answered your own question there, if you understand Mao's base tenets and have even a cursory understanding of history of China.
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Gotta say, this is the strangest troll I've had in a while. I'll entertain it for a while I suppose.
It seems that you're confusing "knowledge of history" with "culture". Direction from former to latter is in fact non-existent. As easily evidenced by the fact that culture existed and was passed down generations when most people were subsistence farmers. By your argument, culture didn't exist until Weimar style schooling system came into existence, or until broadcast television came to exist in each country.
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The moon? The frickin' government!!! (Score:1)
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Of course it can change. It was changed completely less than a century ago.
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Something like it happens in Venezuela: it's will call it a 'dictatorship' hurts so many people...
:/
* just call it authoritarian for now on to let chinese people in in this debate, please
* the linked article defines sensationalism
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The nearly 1 million China citizens of Islamic orientation in re-education camps LOVE China. That's why they need to be re-educated.
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No, the average Chinese does NOT like their gov. They just know that uprising now will not work.
Re:Wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, I couldn't believe it when the French military opened fire with tanks and killed hundreds of peacefully protesting students in yellow vests on the Champs-Élysées...
If only the French loved their government as much as the Chinese love theirs, surely then we'd have hundreds of thousands of French people attending *definitely not prisons* education camps to learn to better express that love.
Re:Wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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As everyone knows it's the right that spends so much effort on worrying about everyone's sexual orientation and which toilet they use, but apparently it's the "left" who are the authoritarians.
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It's really free? https://www.ted.com/talks/jaro... [ted.com] https://libreflix.org/assistir... [libreflix.org] https://libreflix.org/assistir... [libreflix.org]
* most Venezuelans think they are in a 'free society', so are most Russians and Turkeys, etc...
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People have a strong aversion to being controlled, but they just love to impose controls on others.
You've just lumped together (under the general heading of "them") two completely different kinds of personalities with rather little overlap.
Re:Wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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30 years of growth out of the last 30 is a good track record.
https://data.worldbank.org/ind... [worldbank.org]
I expect their growth to slow mainly because they're catching up with the US and Europe and growth from there is inherently slower. Whether it's further slowed by a change in Government policy or kept above global averages by those policies is going to be interesting in the next couple of decades. But as I said, I expect their growth to slow from its current rate.
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...allowed people to build and run businesses without Party interference.
You have misunderstood how things work in China.
Try reading some history books, or even better visit China.
Talk to a few of the locals, they're nice enough people, and they're always keen to practise their english.
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It seems that once you get rid of inflexible ideology, you can focus on what matters, instead of fixating on how thoroughly "communist" or "capitalist" you can be. China has began to dispense with the rigid ideology the past few decades. The US has doubled down on ideology. Guess which country is rising, and which is falling.
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If they revolt they will be killed or sent to re-education camps. If they just use the US version of Steam at worst one or two of those millions might go to jail and more likely the government will just block it one day.
Also this is a bunch of gamers, probably lacking much political engagement and given all the bad press about video games in China at the moment probably lacking much public support too.
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Steam is merely a market place. Few people use the Steam extras (voice chat, text overlays) and there is plenty of healthy competition there. But as a market place, big deal, why does it matter if there are fans or detractors? That's like posting an article saying that the Chinese don't like Tesco. As a market place, Steam has a big drawback of DRM (not the same as anti-piracy), not as onerous as some competitors but it's still a drawback.
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this is a bunch of gamers, probably lacking much political engagement
There are over 550 million 'gamers' in China, but feel free to write them off as inconsequential and irrelevant, instead of the majority of people under the age of 50.
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More importantly, they lack political engagement because they're too busy playing games. Take that away and they'll have time to think about overthrowing the party.
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Gamers who play on mobile phones... Remember that until very recently there was a ban on importing consoles so it was either Chinese domestic ones (mostly knock-offs of 16 bit era or ARM based emulation boxes) or a relatively expensive gaming PC.
And this population is 30 million, still quite significant but I'm betting that the intersection of gamers using Steam and people politically motivated enough to fight the system is quite small.
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PC gamers: Wealthier than the average population. More technically proficient.
That means they're influencers within their social spheres. Family, friends.
They don't need to fight the system. They just need to mention how shitty it is. Others will fight it for them.
Plus your 30 million is too low, according to another post further down.
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My employee ate rats and small birds when he was young.
Now he has a good job and a stable income.
He is one of the 800 million China has brought out of poverty the last 40 years. He is also one of the 400 million who has made it into the middle class.
This is not the generation that will revolt against their government.
Frankly, the western democracies are closer to revolt than China.
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The citizen will need time before uprising again.
Until then, it is best to put pressure on the gov, via the outside.
Just keep in mind that Chinese gov has loads of ppl that are trolling here and lying to push Chinese gov POV.
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Perfect name (Score:2)
If ever there was a perfect name for a communist "company", "Perfect World" would be it.
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Dissent by proxy (Score:3)
Well done rulers of China, you got dissent by proxy. They can't criticise you guys directly, but they'll rise up via the commercial products that you guys get your hands into.
Doublethink:
1. Communist Party is the best party in the world (except for the US, who now have the best of everything)
2. Steam sucks! We want better games! We demand change!
Venezuela is the country that appraises more... (Score:1)
Fringe (Score:5, Interesting)
Chinese gamers love Steam... the global version of it, anyway. There are an estimated 30 million Chinese users playing games on the platform
For China, 30 million is just a fringe user base. I think it would be accurate to rephrase as 'not very many Chinese gamers have even heard of Steam'
Re:Fringe (Score:5, Insightful)
For China, 30 million is just a fringe user base.
That depends entirely on how poor your math skills are: are you comparing that figure to the number of PC gamers in China or the number of people??
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For China, 30 million is just a fringe user base.
That depends entirely on how poor your math skills are: are you comparing that figure to the number of PC gamers in China or the number of people??
According to this article [venturebeat.com], there are around 300 million PC gamers in China. So, the 30 million is still a small portion of gamers. However, many Chinese gamers play in internet cafes, and those are the gamers that Steam wants to access.
If only the people of China could do something... (Score:1)
What might this mean for the inverse? (Score:2)
Perfect World is mentioned here as teaming up with Steam. Perfect World is a developer, owner, and publisher of MMORPGs, Notable examples of games they have include: Neverwinter Online, Star Trek Online, Torchlight, Final Fantasy Type-0, Champions Online, and City of Heroes.
How much of this content is designed in China these days? How much of the content that appeals to a
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What's wrong with the existing rules which already prohibit harassment and the like? Or is your issue with enforcement?
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It's right in the steam topic that you created, before it got locked:
Ask for rules that protect everyone.
Wait, the rules are there.
Report and move on.
I suspect you're not getting the support you want from the