I noticed a few small games that don't support English back when I was still checking the discovery queue, too. Honestly, it's baffling, English support should absolutely be a requirement when you want to sell your game on an international storefront. But Steam stopped being a professional storefront a long time ago, so who cares anymore, am I right? :/
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Well, it is not surprising, it is just more upfront. Steam may be an American company, but its real money-maker, the market is ruled by Russian and now Chinese users. These two countries are also the ones posting the largest amount of games there, by far. Very far.
Simply put, Steam is primarily for the Chinese and secondary for the CIS markets, and everything else is just tetriary. It has been like that for years, only the Western segment was in second place, so it was not that obvious.
If you want an online game store that does not have a Chinese bias, I am afraid your best (and only) bets are itch.io, and maybe GOG. The Chinese online users have way too much money for entertainment companies to not bend to them. Valve especially, they are more focused on making money without any regards to anything else than Activision and EA combined.
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if it's simple game, then just play it. but i doubt i will BUY in the first place though
but on the other hand, some of their RPG are actually looking REALLY-REALLY GOOD. sigh, even if i do buy it i can't even "enjoy" the game. you know being RPG and story, not just wall of text...
but still, is steam also sell games in china?
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i didnt know that, because most other western companies can't penetrate chinese market. and i only play games lol, never read news
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Actually, for now(before Steam China launching someday), Steam doesn't "sell" games in China, steam just provide purchase channel and available payments for Chinese users.It 's somehow like personally buying foreign products on foreign websites (and without import duty).
So, if you live in China mainland, you have to use VPN or a special DNS tool to have access to steam community and discussion, while the store page is available for ordinary connect. (Maybe thanks to WTO agreement?)
And yes, like talgaby said, even though, Steam has become China's largest PCgame sellers. (So did China market to steam)
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i see, kinda weird using vpn just to access it's community. no wonder there's more chinese games
i would love to buy it, but without any english patch, no thanks.not even unofficial patch are enough (at least for me)
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we can't play because they don't support English
I feel like "can't" is an overstatement, unless there's a cognitive impairment involved.
Like, there's a progression from "don't want to bother with the effort required"->"it's too difficult/too low in returns relative to effort to bother woth" -> "can't accomplish it even with effort". We're at the middle point. :P
Well, I'm not clarifying that to poke at your use of "can't" [as in, I'm not making a linguistic point], I just want to point out that foreign language titles can be valuable to non-native speakers who have interest in learning or improving with a second language. So their inclusion on Steam [to non-native nationalities] is inherently a good thing (even if it isn't something which is necessarily of benefit to every user). [There's also plenty of games that can be played even without translations, due to intuitive interfaces and gameplay concepts; I've played some of those myself.] Could benefit from better filtering, but that's a common truth for Steam. :P
There are a handful of games I'd really like translations for, though, so I definitely get your sentiment. ^.^
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Well, now you have a good reason to learn chinese.
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i'm more concert of the large amount of trash that we can't play because it is, well, above all...trash
if the game was good, they would either get some extra money to hire translators or the community would put in the effort themselves
the dev didn't put any effort in it, its likely just more shovelware. If anything, it helps me when to ignore potential bad games
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I've noticed it a lot more as well. I see it as a good thing though, since I'm sure these games were releasing on other platforms and just never coming to Steam before, so we'd never hear about them. Now we know about them and if one looks amazing and enough English-speakers (and/or any other languages) show interest, we may get to a point where we see more games available than we ever have before.
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I've been going through steam discovery queues tonight... I know sounds crazy but during the last sale I've seen a few interesting titles and wanted to continue a bit, see if there's anything else that would interest me... and I've noticed something that, well, surprised me a bit, because I've always been told something like that will never happen.
Number of games on Steam that have "English not supported" is apparently rising.
We're not talking about just very complex story-heavy Chinese role-play/historical multi-genre AA titles... Even small puzzles that don't really need much translating are being published with no English support.
As someone who played a lot of Chinese cartridges for NES back in 1996, it's really hard to know what mode you're choosing, let alone to use settings window in a language you don't know. And the irony of what I said is not lost to me, as English is NOT my native language.
But somehow I always found English to be "the language of PC games", and I've heard multiple times in the past you can't even release the game on Steam if it doesn't have English... I mean it's a US company after all... but apparently you can, and people/companies do. And they sell.
And some of them look really good, like fresh and different, but I can't grasp what's happening in those screenshots (imagine a manager, or a roleplay game where you have no idea what an entire sheet is saying), so buying them is not a smart idea at the moment.
So yeah, what was my point?
More and more Chinese games that have no English support. Some look good/interesting. How can we play them with no English translation? Anyone else noticed this?
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