Steam Store blocked in China - War between Tencent and Valve?
Gamers want to relax from the stress of their daily lives when playing. What if real world politics interfere with their platform of choice?
It's nothing new for the government of the Peoples Republic to use their 'Golden Shield' project, better known as Great Firewall of China (GFW), to shut down and silence foreign voices not under their control.
As a Steam user wrote:
" google is blocked, baidu replaced it;
youtube is blocked, youku replaced it;
wikipedia is blocked, baidu bai-ke replaced it.
not political ? who controls GFW ? think about it."
Possibly it is a sign for an all-out war between the worlds biggest game company Tencent and the worlds biggest game distribution platform Steam.
"Tencent can see the exact number of Steam transactions on its own WeChat pay and seems to have decided this money should be earned by its Interactive Entertainment Group. In fact, Tencent already tested the water back in early 2016 when they quietly put Don’t Starve on the shelf of TGP and sold a million copies (at $4 each) in a month. This wouldn’t be surprising if you knew TGP had more than 200 million registered users. Players have been enjoying League of Legends, Dungeon and Fighter, Crossfire, and other Tencent games on the platform since 2013. Furthermore, anyone with a Tencent QQ account (~868 million users) can easily login to any Tencent products." https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/18/how-tencents-wegame-is-changing-to-compete-with-steam-in-china/
Tencent can't be interested in competition to the revamped, renamed gaming platform WeGame and it can be seen as fact that no multi-billion company in China is acting without the regimes approval and backing.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1362241&page=5
The petition to Valve to enable full SSL support on Steam must be seen in the context of fear of privacy breach and personal repercussions through the Chinese government.
http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/1458455461480324749/
If you happen to be a Chinese Steam user please share your experiences in the comments.
Edit:
To answer to some of the suggestions in the comments. The GFW seems to be rather sophisticated so using a VPN may not always unblock the Steam store.
Using the TOR extension makes you suspicious automatically as it is used by criminals to access the Dark Web or dissidents to evade censorship. It was also shown that TOR is vulnerable to Man-in-the-middle attacks if nodes are compromised.
