Steam Global vs Steam China: A Developer’s Guide

01

What each storefront actually is

Steam Global is the international Steam client and store. It is reachable from mainland China, Chinese players use it in large numbers, and your game is already on it. Valve shows players prices in their regional currency, and store pages and in-game text can be offered in Simplified Chinese without any change to who publishes the game.

Steam China (蒸汽平台) is a separate service that Valve launched in 2021 with Perfect World. It has its own client, its own store and its own catalogue. Valve’s documentation states that Chinese government approval is a prerequisite for a game to be released there, and that the Chinese publisher holds the approval number shown on the product page (Steamworks: Steam China). Games on Steam China carry real-name verification and anti-addiction controls like every other licensed platform in the mainland.

games on global Steam

~118,000

Approximate catalogue, December 2025

games on Steam China

~368

Approved titles by December 2025 (Mighil)

Simplified Chinese on Steam

33.7%

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

The two catalogues are not versions of the same store. Steam China carries a small set of licensed titles; the rest of Steam’s catalogue is on the global client, which is where the Chinese audience actually plays.

02

Side by side

03

What a Steam Global plan should cover

A Steam Global plan means making your existing release work for Chinese players, with or without a partner. The deliverables are specific, and a proposal that does not name them is a platform list, not a plan.

• Localisation of the game and the page as separate jobs. Steam treats them separately (Steamworks localisation), and players check both. A Chinese title on the capsule and Chinese subtitles on the trailer are part of the page.
• A price and discount schedule set before launch. Valve changed its pricing tool in March 2026 to offer three conversion methods; the straight exchange-rate method overprices China. Chinese buyers expect to be the cheapest region and react badly to changes after launch.
• Channels opened in advance. A Heybox developer account (mainland phone number required), a Bilibili account for the trailer premiere, a QQ group as the complaint line.
• Creator work in the three to four weeks before launch. Keys and a sincere message in Chinese reach mid-size creators; large ones only do paid work.
• Someone reading Chinese reviews daily in launch week. Negatives cluster on days three to six, and a Chinese-language reply from the studio’s own account is what recovers them.
• Reporting against a baseline you saved before the activity started, with campaign links tagged through Steam’s UTM analytics.

Keep the commercial plan separate from regulatory conclusions. Being on international Steam does not establish that every proposed local activity is permitted; the NPPA’s rules on the domestic promotion and operation of overseas online games exist, and a partner running paid promotion inside China should be able to say how its proposal sits with them. See the licence guide for the questions to put to a partner.

04

When Steam China is worth considering

Steam China is a project in its own right, and it makes sense in a narrow set of cases:

• A Chinese publisher wants to carry the licence and has filed imported games before. The publisher’s record is the decisive input, because you cannot file yourself.
• The game is an online or service title that will need mainland servers, real-name login and operated communities anyway.
• Measured Chinese demand on global Steam is strong enough that the publisher can make a commercial case for a second, licensed presence, typically a year or two after a successful global launch.

The cost of being wrong is high: a licence filing takes the best part of a year, imports were about 3% of approvals in 2026, and content changes requested in review can reach into the design. Monster Hunter: World was pulled from Tencent’s WeGame days after its 2018 China launch over complaints, despite having been approved (GameRevolution), so approval is not the end of the exposure either.

05

Keep collaboration and app transfer apart

A partner asking to work on your game on either storefront is not a reason to transfer the Steam application. Valve provides task-specific user permissions for marketing, localisation and finance (Steamworks user management); transferring an app is a separate, deliberate process (app transfer documentation) that a marketing partnership never needs.

Start from the work the partner must do, then agree the least access that supports it, and have the contract and the Steamworks setup reflect the same ownership and approval boundaries. If the route is Steam China, the licensed build and the Chinese store page are the publisher’s to operate; your global app stays yours.

06

Make the decision for this game

That is a recommendation to investigate, not a universal answer. A useful route decision names what is known, what must be verified and who owns the next step. Our step-by-step publishing guide covers the full process, and the sample assessment shows what a route decision looks like written down.