What is PC gaming like in China?

Hey gang,

So, I was talking to a student the other day, and linked them a Youtube video, and they quietly said "Yeah I can't watch that over on China", which got me to thinking about other forms of entertainment in China.

I looked it up earlier, and apparently, there's over 325 million PC gamers in China- but they don't really have Steam over there. So it got me to thinking:

What is the Chinese gaming scene like?

Is it just a lot of MMO's and F2P Gacha games? Is it just League/Dota?

If anyone can educate me, I'd be very grateful

PUBG Mobile is enormous, from my understanding

If you have more than a fleeting interest, you should check out Daniel Ahmad on twitter; he is often quoted for articles on 'gaming in China'

From what I've seen, they'll often use Bilibili, or clients like QQ or WeChat.

Honor of Kings, a mobile game, is absolutely huge over there. It's one of the pillars behind Tencent's explosive growth. It's also been a major contributor to the Chinese government's crackdowns on gaming habits for young people.

If only Drew was still doing Cloth Map, COVID never happened, and it was easier (I bet it's hard to go there?) to get in/out of China, he could have gone in there and found out.

It's more than a decade old at this point but Crossfire, which is the Counter-Strike clone that Remedy is developing a story mode for, is massive in China.

Other than that I know that Dota, League and Overwatch are also huge there.

It's also way more heavily monitored than anything else done over here. There's a Bombcast snippet about what Jeff had to do to get into the beta of Call of Duty Online way back when. And if memory serves, in order to release a game, you need approval from a government body similar to the ESRB, except, it's a government body -- your game doesn't see the light of day except if it's approved.

And this news just broke, following up on a previous posters comment about Government crackdowns:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/china-bans-online-gaming-for-minors-except-from-8-pm-9-pm-friday-to-sunday/

In other words -- while it was pretty free for a while, it looks like the Chinese government has gotten serious about locking things down. However, Chinese politics in general is this weird mix of realpolitik, no-holds barred capitalism, Chinese traditionalism, and earnest Communist rhetoric - so the situation itself is constantly in flux.

Steam has been "unofficially" available in China for years and officially launched back in February this year.

AFAIK (I live in Korea) it's closed to anyone that isn't a citizen, a resident, or has some special circumstance (in other words, not travel). Just like most of the area around here outside of, I think, Thailand.

I have to guess that a lot of it is similar to here...it's incredible to me how many people play games and how many of those same people really only play the same 3 games on PC. LoL, Overwatch, and PUBG. Obviously that is going to be more diverse once you branch out to areas like Seoul or Incheon, but it's still just amazing to me how much gaming I've talked about/encountered across a variety of age groups is either those three games or whatever mobile game is hot. The mobile gaming here is INSANELY popular, an from what I hear China isn't much different.