How to Measure Chinese Demand for Your Steam Game

01

The three signals

Three things say Chinese players already want a game: Simplified Chinese reviews arriving on a build with no Chinese support, a larger share of wishlists from China than sales or page traffic would predict, and players asking for the language in reviews and discussions. Any one of them is worth a look. All three on an unlocalised game is the clearest signal a studio gets before it has spent anything.

of Steam users set Simplified Chinese

33.7%

Largest primary language on 2024 annual data (Valve, GDC 2025)

of reviews on recent releases are in Simplified Chinese

8.4%

Across 495 games from outside China (China Steam Signals)

China share of players, published cases

4.6% to 64%

Restrats to Escape from Duckov

The spread in the published cases is the point. Balatro and Abiotic Factor sit around 20% of players from China on their publisher’s figures; Gods vs Horrors reached 45% of players but 27% of revenue; Restrats got 4.6% of copies despite full localisation. Your genre, your price and the demand you can already see predict your number better than any market statistic does.

02

The Steamworks regional report

Steamworks reports sales, revenue, refunds and wishlist additions by country. The public wishlist page shows a total; the regional breakdown is in the sales and wishlist reports inside Steamworks (wishlist documentation). Pull the last 90 days and the lifetime figures for China, and set them against your top five countries.

03

Reading the Chinese reviews

Count Simplified Chinese reviews as a share of all reviews, then read them. Group them by what players actually discuss: translation, performance and connectivity, controls, difficulty, length, story and value. Keep the positive reasons to buy alongside the problems to fix; a publisher brief needs both. A review in Chinese shows interest in Chinese-language support, not the buyer’s location, so keep the review share and the regional report side by side with the date ranges recorded.

What Chinese reviewers tend to praise and penalise, by genre, is in what Chinese players want.

04

The Chinese review score

Since August 2025 Steam shows a separate review score per language once a game has 2,000 reviews overall and 200 in that language (Valve via GamingOnLinux). If you have one, the gap between your Chinese score and your overall score is the single most useful number on the page. Read it against comparable titles rather than against your English score, because Chinese scores run lower across the board.

A gap wider than the median for your genre points at something specific: translation register, a balance change, price, performance on the hardware Chinese players use, or a public remark players took badly. The recurring triggers and the responses that worked are in the marketing guide.

05

Comparable titles

Pick games close to yours in genre, price, release stage and scope. For each, note the Simplified Chinese review share, the Chinese score against the overall score where Steam shows it, which features Chinese reviewers praise, what frustrates them and where they say they found the game. Record why each comparison is relevant before drawing a conclusion from it; an active Chinese community around a comparable title is a reason to investigate, not a forecast.

1. 1

   Build a list of five to ten

   Same genre and price band, released in the last two years, with at least a few hundred reviews. The China Steam Signals index ranks recent releases by Chinese review share and is a quick way to find the ones in your genre.

2. 2

   Read their Chinese reviews, not just the score

   What a genre’s Chinese players reward (depth, co-op, balance, value) and penalise (forced PvP, short length, a translation in the wrong register) shows up in the reviews of the comparable titles before it shows up in yours.

3. 3

   Note the pricing

   Chinese players expect their region to be among the cheapest and judge against local norms: under CNY 100 for indies. A comparable title priced well above the norm with a low Chinese score is telling you something about price, not about demand.

06

Turning it into a decision

The point of the exercise is a decision about three things: whether to localise and how much, how to price China, and whether a Chinese partner would add more than its share costs. Set the numbers out on one page and answer each in turn.

• Chinese reviews as a share of the total, and the top three themes in them.
• China share of wishlists against China share of units and of revenue, last 90 days and lifetime.
• China refund rate against the global rate.
• Your Chinese review score and the gap to overall, if Steam shows one, against two comparable titles.
• Where Chinese traffic comes from, if you have UTM data.
• Three to five comparable titles with their Chinese review share and what their Chinese reviews say.

That page is most of what a free EightSix assessment produces, with our read of the likely route and the questions to resolve before approaching publishers. The sample assessment shows the format on a fictional game.

07

What the numbers do not tell you

Steam’s data describes players who already found the game. It says nothing about the players a Heybox page or a Bilibili creator would have reached, which is the demand a partner is selling. Language is not location. A low Chinese share on an unlocalised game may be a language problem rather than a demand problem, and a high share on a localised game may be a price. And one month’s figures around a Steam sale or Spring Festival, when the monthly count of Chinese Steam users roughly doubles, are not a baseline. Record the date range with every number and compare like with like.