Valve via GDC 2025: '33.7% of Steam Users have Simplified Chinese set as their Primary Language in 2024, 0.2% above English'

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
Thanks to /u/atahutahatena from /r/games for sharing this info.

As seen on the recent GameDiscover article, Valve's Steam presentation at GDC confirmed that Simplified Chinese has ever so slightly surpassed English as the primary language on Steam. Important to note, this isn't based on the ever-fluctuating hardware survey that Steam has. It is based on a report straight out of the horse's mouth.

Other notable miscellaneous slides:
  • Early access unsurprisingly continues to be a type of release that games like to use on Steam.
  • Over 50% of games come out of Early Access after a year.
  • And interestingly, the "Friend invite-only playtest" style that Valve used to great effect with Deadlock last year is going to be rolled out as a beta feature to more developers.
Valve confirmed that they'll upload the full talk on their Steamworks youtube channel in the near future.

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Thanks to /u/atahutahatena from /r/games for sharing this info.

As seen on the recent GameDiscover article, Valve's Steam presentation at GDC confirmed that Simplified Chinese has ever so slightly surpassed English as the primary language on Steam. Important to note, this isn't based on the ever-fluctuating hardware survey that Steam has. It is based on a report straight out of the horse's mouth.

Other notable miscellaneous slides:
  • Early access unsurprisingly continues to be a type of release that games like to use on Steam.
  • Over 50% of games come out of Early Access after a year.
  • And interestingly, the "Friend invite-only playtest" style that Valve used to great effect with Deadlock last year is going to be rolled out as a beta feature to more developers.
Valve confirmed that they'll upload the full talk on their Steamworks youtube channel in the near future.

bjxgdu.jpeg

1wk5oh.jpeg

r27xls.jpeg
Good, there's way more Chinese people than there are American and European combined.
 

Astray

Member
Shuhei Yoshida basically gave that away when he said that Sony is porting its titles to PC primarily for the Chinese market.

Just keep in mind that English does not just mean US or Anglo countries either.. Almost anyone who doesn't have their native language supported or wants an easier time during troubleshooting will be using English (this includes me btw).
 

Ceadeus

Member
You would think we would see more Chinese AAA games.
Yeah how come there are so few to almost none? Maybe it takes a multicultural team? When it comes to Chinese developers we rarely see other cultures being represented. Even in genshin impact. It's just like they live in their own bubble on purpose and won't ever get out.
 
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Robot Carnival

Gold Member
I mean, the country has a population of around 1.4 billion (1,400,000,000) and plenty of immigrants all around the world. is it really that much of a surprise? I have a couple friends here in the US who speaks English but their Steam language setting is still set to Chinese.
 

Robot Carnival

Gold Member
Yeah how come there are so few to almost none? Maybe it takes a multicultural team? When it comes to Chinese developers we rarely see other cultures being represented. Even in genshin impact. It's just like they live in their own bubble on purpose and won't ever get out.

that's because it's pretty hard to make AAA or even just good games when you're restricted in every step by the government. just think about all the censorship WOW and DOTA2 had to make in order to release the game officially in Mainland China. I know for movie industry, you can't depict gangsters/mafia winning in the end is definitely a thing. for games, I imagine there are something similar. sometimes you might not even know what you're making had stepped on some toes until you got fined or worse by the CCP.
 
So Steam is basically Chinese now.
It's TRUE representation. Americans think having one Asian in a group of 5 is somehow representative when in reality 30% of all humans are either Chinese or Indian, and another 30% is all the other Asian ethnic group around it. So in reality 10 people representing the whole population would have 6 Asians in them. DEI treating Asians as non-existent is why it is a failed movement in Asia.
 
What is the difference between simplified and traditional chinese?
The simplified Chinese has all the same grammar, but the words themselves have their strokes reduced. Imagine if English is kept the same but all the alphabets are re-designed to be faster to write. It is purely a Font difference and you can switch between them using google.

This was done only under CCP controlled areas, so you can tell when someone is from China vs someone from Taiwan purely by what font they use.
 

Ceadeus

Member
that's because it's pretty hard to make AAA or even just good games when you're restricted in every step by the government. just think about all the censorship WOW and DOTA2 had to make in order to release the game officially in Mainland China. I know for movie industry, you can't depict gangsters/mafia winning in the end is definitely a thing. for games, I imagine there are something similar. sometimes you might not even know what you're making had stepped on some toes until you got fined or worse by the CCP.
You're right, I heard couple stories about all the changes Blizzard needed to do for WoW to release in China. It's weird to just imagine how different the gaming development would be if the government here would start doing the same.

I feel like it would be a huge step back and many people would quit

Edit: because it's being directly creatively restrained. It goes so much against the grains its almost like having shackles
 
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Robot Carnival

Gold Member
What is the difference between simplified and traditional chinese?

Russian is third most used language on Steam, lol. Is Steam still working in Russia/Belarus?



One is quite simple, the other one is more traditional, like when you meet your girlsfriends parents.

yeah, I feel the fact that Steam is host to CS and DOTA2 along with a lot of other free to play games is also a contributor to those numbers.

The simplified Chinese has all the same grammar, but the words themselves have their strokes reduced. Imagine if English is kept the same but all the alphabets are re-designed to be faster to write. It is purely a Font difference and you can switch between them using google.

This was done only under CCP controlled areas, so you can tell when someone is from China vs someone from Taiwan purely by what font they use.

this last post explained it perfectly. and the main reason for Simplified Chinese' creation was because when CCP took over the country back then, they needed to educate the predominantly illiterate farmer population in everything as soon as possible. Traditional Chinese would be too hard and too time consuming to learn in that situation, so they invented the Simplified version and it kinda stuck ever since.
 

Killjoy-NL

Gold Member
It's TRUE representation. Americans think having one Asian in a group of 5 is somehow representative when in reality 30% of all humans are either Chinese or Indian, and another 30% is all the other Asian ethnic group around it. So in reality 10 people representing the whole population would have 6 Asians in them. DEI treating Asians as non-existent is why it is a failed movement in Asia.
Not only that, only ~9% of the world-population is white and not even all white people are native English-speakers.
 

Kerotan

Member
It's TRUE representation. Americans think having one Asian in a group of 5 is somehow representative when in reality 30% of all humans are either Chinese or Indian, and another 30% is all the other Asian ethnic group around it. So in reality 10 people representing the whole population would have 6 Asians in them. DEI treating Asians as non-existent is why it is a failed movement in Asia.
They'd rather do 6 African's, 1 Asian, 1 euro, 1 south American and 1 tranny.
 
Once the Chinese government realizes this I will give it 6 months to a year before they steal the Steam code, nationalize it, give control to a friend of the CCP, give it another name, and then regulate Steam out of their country. Success is a double edged sword.
 
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