Steam Community Blocked in China

China has a reputation for internet censorship. Now they appear to have blocked the Steam Community in its entirety.

According to Greatfire.org, a website dedicated to tracking the Chinese censorship of the internet, steamcommunity.com has been inaccessible since last Friday. The Steam storefront and homepage appear to work as normal, only the community section has been blocked.

The community is where gamers can go and express thoughts and ideas. It's little surprise that it would get singled out compared to the rest. The Steam Community provides a forum for every Steam game, as well as user profiles and inventory. Chinese players will still be able to play their games, as well as buy new ones. They will not be able to view forum posts and other social content about it. This includes patch updates by developers.

Much like we recently saw with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, anything that gets more popular than expected is either bootlegged or banned from China. PUBG developers had to sign a deal with Tencent, a Chinese publisher, in order to release their game in China, one that had been modified to "better fit their values."

Tencent has their own game distribution system known as WeGame. Since only the community is blocked and not the storefront, I'm led to believe that this is an act of censorship and not market manipulation.