Steam
How the hell can Hong Kong get to the same visit count as USA?
Nothing in my game or my marketing is focused on any country specifically. The game and the Steam page are in English only. How can a country with less than 10M people get me more visits than the US?
Discussion
Because people from mainland China are using Hong Kong accounts and VPN to access games outside of the limited Steam China.
I think maybe Korea as well?
Korea already has some of the fastest internet. World wide as well, they don't need VPNs it would only hurt their latency, something Korean gamers care A LOT about.
Edit: It has come to my attention that you might mean North Korea. If the case, just owning a computer can mean jail and torture for your whole family. I'm forever grateful to not be born there.
i mean Chinese gamers vpn to Korea
are the numbers behind the bars the actual raw numbers? because 1k isn't much, so hong kong reaching that doesnt really seem that surprising
Without units it's hard to know, that could be visits per hour, per minute, per week and so on. They could also be in thousands (i.e 1,000 showing is a million visits).
The value here is the relative comparison between Hong Kong, USA and everything else.
the default on that page is "most recent week" so most likely last full 7 days
The unit is "visits", it's at the top of the image
Visits per....? Lifetime? Today? Per minute? It's a chart missing units and the full details. I'm guessing they are listed as notes on the original but this snapshot doesn't have it.
You're right
OP mentioned that this is the amount of people visiting their own game's Steam page, in which case, 1k is reasonable for an independent game.
VPNs and I know most people here say that all of them are from China but I can attest that here in South East Asia, every VPN that we use defaults to Hong Kong so that also helps.
I'm surprised Canada is #4
Cause we're GAMERS
Canadians may play video games, but I would hope the majority aren't gamers.
We try to keep misogyny and inceldom relatively low at least
... even I have trouble deciphering this comment, lol.
Your false equivalency comment highlights the reason why this type of rhetoric will always fail. You tried to be funny and insult people that you cannot and most likely refuse to comprehend, while trying to equate them to a group that is only tangentially related.
It's not their failure. It's yours. But most likely you'll be unable to see why too.
That's a lot of words to say you support incels
Don't try to belittle me, it's useless. From what I've read from you, there's nothing you can write to attempt such a thing.
Whatever pain people caused you before to make you behave this way, I hope you find a way to heal and move on.
I go fishing in Canada every year. Its miles away from a small town of 3k people in the wilderness. Bugs are brutal in the bush but the landscape is gorgeous. A local says there are young guys in the bush wondering how people can sit inside and game all day while the people gaming all day wonder why the fuck you would go through all that just to fish/hunt.
That and most of the people in Canada live in like 10 cities
Canada just doesn't have that many people compared to its size. Their population is about 80% the size of South Korea's, and less than a third the size of Japan's.
Which is why the previous user was surprised that htye are number 4 ... it's a high ranking for a low-medium population country like canada.
I'm from Hong Kong, we just fucking love your game bro
Servers and VPNs dude
Hong Kong is where Chinese people tend to set their VPN to since their internet laws is less strict than the rest of China.
Also Hong Kong has pretty substantial amount of English speakers.
Hong Kong is the closest VPN to mainland China
Because in HK the only fun is playing steam game :)
Hong Kong is English speaking no?
What’s the game called? I wanna do my part in 超英趕美
It's called Carnage Cliff
The game and the Steam page are in English only - OP I think your sentence sounds a bit ignorant, do you think people from Hong Kong or China don't know English? Congrats on your first step to Chinese market though! :)
For mainland china this is kinda true. Obviously there are people speaking english here, but the majority definetly doesn't. Can't say for Hong Kong though. Never been there. I would assume they have more english speakers than mainland china.
China
Chinese players routing through Hong Kong to get access.
It’s just Chinese people lol
That’s just china people through a vpn in Hong Kong
Bro chill we just like your stuff besides,Hong Kong a population of about 8 million soooo even without the stats from VPN. 8 million pop means we have a lot of gamers, hell both my parents in their 60s are gamers (Not not mobile games). So is not that crazy.
Btw English is our 2nd/ 3rd most used language. Depends person to person.
They fit a lot of people in those tall skyscrapers.
VPN dood
Chinese users using VPN exit node in HK.
Brazil 🇧🇷
why does it matter/you care?
Hong Kong is not an independent country. It is a special Administrative region of China.
UN's resolution to remove Hong Kong from the colonial territories list and the filing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration with the UN both indicate that the United Nations recognizes the People's Republic of China's sovereignty over Hong Kong and supports the process of Hong Kong's return to China.
Since July 1, 1997, Hong Kong has officially been a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, enjoying a high degree of autonomy under the "One Country, Two Systems" principle and the Basic Law.
VPN. Hong Kong still has more liberal laws than the rest of China. When the UK returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the condition was that freedom be preserved. Of course, it's getting progressively worse, but it's still better than the rest of the country.
maybe it is posted in one of the local forums and gone 'viral'?
So Turkey has one of the most visits. Yet none of the major games has Turkish language support. Economy bad is not an excuse because brazilian portuguese is in most of the games.
Portuguese has like 280m speakers, turkish has not even 80m..
- Brazil: Approximately 4.9 million Steam users. This places Brazil as the 4th largest Steam user base globally.
- Turkey: Approximately 2.8 million Steam users. Turkey typically ranks around the 7th largest Steam user base globally.
Conclusion:
While Brazil has a larger absolute number of Steam users, a higher percentage of Turkey's total population (approximately 3.27%) has a Steam account compared to Brazil (approximately 2.30%). This indicates a higher penetration rate of Steam usage within the Turkish population.
You could say that money flow is more in Brazil. That is correct. But this doesnt explain it why Turkish language support should be near to none.
Also: Estimates for the total number of Turkic speakers worldwide vary slightly, but generally fall within the range of 200 million to over 230 million people.
Now add to those 4.9 million any other steam user that speaks portuguese, aka Portugal and PALOP.
And this still does not explain why there shouldnt be a Turkish language support.
Maybe not, but you should come up with better arguments for it instead of telling half-truths.
Well only thing i say Turkish support is not hard to do for the numbers of gamers we have active on steam. But some people are just racist.
and they aren't agaisnt brazilians? lol
Bro its simple, financially speaking turkish is not relevant enough, they generally add 5/6 languages and thats it. Turkish it not at the top of relevant languages.
Maybe law and regulations? I would say German will not be supported if they aren't rich, they make EA to create a robot versions for Red alert generals
I think it is mostly a money issue. Game developers would think the turks as "The gamer who will buy this already speaks english. No need for localization" type of mind set. Even GTA 6 is not coming with Turkish and this makes no sense. There are a lot of Playstation and Xbox players who will buy it in day 0. A lot of FiveM servers are Turkish or has a lot of Turkish players. Hell even MTA has still turkish players. So it is not a small ignorable place in my opinion.
Does turkey have consoles being sold in there officially? Brazil only started getting translations on most games once the consoles were well and officially established in the late 2000s. Yes, I know we're talking about steam and PC gaming here, but console gaming is what drove widespread translation of games to pt-br. Before that we would only get the occasional PC game translated (and a few tectoy/sega games in the 90s).
On another note, most translations are complete trash these days. I don't even bother using them.
Yeah. Since Playstation 3 came out. games are even coming with dubbed versions of them. Xbox not so much. But PC on the other hand is not having these good things. Back in the time I was stunned when i see the Uncharted games in Turkish dub.
And yes. Sadly AI cannot translate them properly. I also do not bother using them but i want my neighbor's little son to understand the story. Not just go in guns blazing in some good title and understand nothing like when i was a child.
It's all about the percentage of people speaking the language around the world. Of course devs will prioritize those and not the 18th most used language in the world.
Then why some of the games has Polish language support? Makes no sense according to your logic. For example the Black Ops 6. Even warzone does not have Turkish support.
Smaller games like Helldivers 2 also has Polish language support but no Turkish.
Mostly indie games or Free to play games like War thunder has fully Turkish language support.
Edit: Why i am getting downvoted by putting down some facts?
Because there's a whole gaming industry in Poland, literally one of the biggest game dev companies is Polish with CDPR. I don't even think there's a single Turkish game dev company nor a Turkish game ever released.
So you are making your point false. It is not just about being the 18th most used language thing.
Also Talewords is %100 Turkish based in Ankara and Warband is still huge in everything. And Crytek is founded by a Turkish in Germany. I am not going to mention the mobile gaming industry even though Turkey is considered a major player
CDPR is also a company that %100 supports Turkish language btw. They are Based.
Honk Kong is a country now? interesting
It is just called a 'special administrative region' now but its just an eyesore for the chinese government
Almost in control, but not quite since hong kong is very connected globally
While Hong Kong is part of China, it has it's own system and is counted separately. One country, two systems.
And because of that, it's used as an access point by people from mainland China to circumvent their internet wall.
It's a "Special Administrative Region" with it's own laws and government.
Istanbul was Constantinople
Areas like Hong Kong is the reason why the "Country" field on most online address forms say "Country or Region". It's to account for areas like Hong Kong that up until recently had a very different laws despite being China.
Hong Kong is a part of China, but has a more western system with laws etc that is different than the rest of China.
This is because Hong Kong used to be a British colony and this was one of the requirements the British had before giving China Hong Kong.
As much as the Basque Country
Except is not...
Exactly. Both are just semi-autonomous provinces of their respective countries.
Turkey has 9th most visits but no Turkish language support in a lot of big games and no Turkish currency😞
These stats are unreliable, at best.
People seem to forget Hong Kong is China
Americans "there is no way this graph can be accurate". Looks at world map, shows only America.
Not very bright if that's what you think this about lmao
*States, united of
Im surprised with Asian Eastern counties, never thought that both Japan Korea and Singapore would be in top counties
Chinese people have to use a vpn to access steam. I guess they go through hong kong or something? Just a guess tho.
this! VPN is the most probable reason... also, the same applies to traveler esims where you get an IP from HK or Singapore in many cases
It also makes sense from a speed point of view, Hong Kong and Singapore have some of the fastest internet in Asia so it would make sense to go through those countries if you were in that area of the world already
Yeah that tracks. Hong Kong and Singapore are like the cheat codes for stable routing in that region. You’d think closer would mean faster, but with some ISPs it’s the opposite. Peering’s a mess sometimes.
Quick side note, does that kind of routing work for Netflix too if you’re in China? Like going through HK or Singapore with a VPN? (Might be one for r/NetflixByProxy.)
It does, but make sure to check your IP address every now and then, Netflix will notice you jumping too frequently between adresses.
Yeah, most likely. I have some friends currently in China who I loaded Mullvad up for and they use Hong Kong servers as it has less latency compared to others and is uncensored
Steam is half-blocked in china, you can purchase/download the game without a vpn/game booster,but for community/disccusion you definitely need one
That’s not true. I just accessed steam about thirty seconds ago sitting in my apartment in China with my vpn off.
This kind of thing is highly variable in China depending on your region and ISP
Reddit is also banned in china. I'm telling xi jinping to lowee your social credits
Nope. People in China have access to Steam
Not the same one though.
Besides some limited social features like the forums, how so? The Steam playercount charts for top 100 games include the Chinese population. We're also able to find and add chinese players as friends, I have a few on my list. Their reviews also show up on every games' store pages regardless of country.
Heavily regulated games library, thats why games outside china needs China publisher. They have fraction of games library compared to steam outside of China. They have only 53 games in 2021
Nobody really uses the Chinese exclusive version of Steam, and even if they do those accounts made on the Chinese client are able to log into the global version of Steam and see the same storefront with largely the same selection of games we do regardless of whether the developers have a contact in China or not, and they still have access to their own lower regional pricing.
VPN isn’t even required to connect to and buy from the international version of Steam. The regulations you mention exist for the Chinese “official” version, but accessing global Steam is as heavily enforced as Pornhub checking if I’m lying about my age.
you are talking about Steam China which no one uses, everybody use the normal steam without the community features
You’re thinking of a different client. People in China use Steam, not Steam China. There’s no reason the library would be heavily regulated. Do you think China has higher levels of censorship than the US? 💀
Obviously it does.
It doesn’t
Hilarious. You don't know what you're talking about. You need a VPN to access most of the internet outside of China.
amd soon you will need to access a vpn to access anything in america.
(as it will all be banned including video games and pornography.)
That’s literally untrue, stop spewing bullshit. Go visit China or ask a native
The two exist at the same time and global Steam is what most people use. Steam China is largely ignored there.
It’s only the community sections that are not accessible for Chinese players without VPN. Buying, and playing games in Global Steam is not restricted in any way.
Not Community tho.
It's very common to use these services to play with community-heavy stuff like Wallpaper Engine.
Ah yeah true Steam doesn’t allow the community tab because it’s not worth it for their small team to manage data protection and fact checking regulations to adhere to Chinese standards
Kids can use it to bypass any screen time limitations that were put in place on the Chinese client (did that ever happen or is the screen time law enforced some other way?). Many games are also blocked in places like China and Germany. They also may just keep their VPN on so they can access western social media that is blocked on the mainland and so they not have their posts tracked.
Posts aren’t tracked in China? You do realise that western social media isn’t blocked in China right? The companies themselves refuse to operate there because of strict fact checking and data protections that the government requires. Since Facebook can’t steal your data in China, they don’t operate there
Yes they are. What is this bollocks you're chatting.
It's not Facebook stealing your data that they care about; also Facebook can't do that in the EU or Britain, either, and they still operate in those places, it's the PLA's domestic control arm that checks posts for signs of either dissention or "excessive western influence" that causes black vans to appear outside of their windows a few days before they suddenly decide to sign up for a "Vocational Education and Training Center." The people doing this do not agree with what Xi and the rest of his cronies are doing and have been doing since the time of Mao.
Holy propaganda mate. No people are not whisked off to detention centres for western influence.
Companies like Facebook choose not to operate in China because the company (CEOs included) would be held accountable for false information, etc. that is shared on them. Facebook also steals and sells loads of user data, which China does not allow and again, would hold people like the CEOs of these companies responsible.
Next you’re going to tell me that you think mentioning Winnie the Pooh or Tianamen Square will get you in legal trouble there (hint: it doesn’t).
Yep, this is what people don't get - western companies can operate in China as long as they abide by the rules set by China. Google, Facebook, etc choose not to. 'Banned' is entirely the wrong term to use.
It's like me having a rule for removing shoes in my home, and I don't let you in because you don't want to remove your shoes - did I 'ban' you from my home? Of course not.
Except those things are blocked there. This is not news. Why are you repeating such bullshit?
Doesn't matter about "operating", the websites and applications are blocked.
Pooh, etc. are not blocked there. Why are you pushing lies?
And for Facebook, etc. they are not blocked by the government. Facebook themselves block access because, again, they don’t want to adhere to the protections set in place.
Yes, they are, and you can test your ignorance by using DeepSeek to ask questions about it. Go to China and you can see these things for yourself, but, like many shills like you, you haven't and think that the US has more censorship than... China.
Here's my question to DeepSeek:
"What happened during the Tiananmen square protests?"
Here's the answer:
"Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else."
They even block stuff outside of China using their tools.
Nonsense. You are one of the only people parroting this nonsense because, it is nonsense.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042915/why-facebook-banned-china.asp
You can see (through the links there) how Meta have tried to enter the marketplace to no avail.
Everything you've posted is bullshit.
Yeah I’m not going to use a LLM to check or prove facts, that’s silly. Again, speak to a native of the country. When I visited China I had zero problems researching Tiananmen Square and learning about it.
As for Facebook and other social media, the article you linked has no verifiable evidence. Most of what you search through things like Google are heavily censored, so you’re going to get propaganda like what you linked.
Why are you trying so hard to lie about these things and share propaganda? What do you gain from it?
Saying things like, "alright, I've smuggled the guns and explosives" would get them in trouble. That's what these people are saying.
Why does this misinformation still exist today? Chinese can use Steam store features (buying and downloading games) directly without VPN. You only need VPN if you want to use some Steam community features (like discussions)
Steam works in China for games , I believe it's just the community sections that are locked off (from what I've heard)
Many games are blocked and they have to comply with the screen time limits China set.
I've asked this question on rednote a few months ago , they them selves say its nearly the same as the foreign versions of steam just without the community hub
That may be true but doesn't impact the general user count of the platform?
People will VPN to places that don't have such blocks and set their storefront as where they VPN to. HK uses the same currency, but is not subject to the same restrictions as mainland China, so it's the obvious choice. Once Xi gets around to expanding The Great Firewall around HK, most of that spike will shift to Singapore or Taiwan. The same thing happens in Germany and Australia. AUS VPNs to Singapore and Germany VPNs to France, Spain, and Italy.
Not even VPN，Chinese players can easily access HK market relative to other servers which is why it's popular。My aunt in China bought a Xbox with HK server once for the same reason of convenience。
Also HK pricing is cheaper，otherwise many would chose to use VPN on Western servers。
UUbooster to be exact...Its a VPN specifically for only games, which means its completely legal and only works with games and steam.
I live in China and have to use it to play any online games with reasonable ping.
好多人使用这个软件访问steam
Most VPNs that work in china can connect you to other regions like the US as well though.
You can but Hong Kong is much faster and stable
Source: been doing this for months
Yeah but why would you choose more ping on purpose lol
i mean for things like Netflix yeah that works, but a closer VPN is better for latency + steam payment options probably change with the VPN so HK is the better option
Steam payment options will stay the same unless you manually change them. I switched from my American current steam to Chinese and anytime I buy games I pay in yuan even though my vpn is set to other countries.
Yes, but constantly changing locations can activate Steam's anti-regional-pricing-explotation system, so it's better to do it all from one place. If your local prices are cheaper, which I am guessing is the case in most of the rest of SE Asia, you do not want to run your VPN through the US/Eurozone. If you get flagged, it may force you to pay US/Eurozone prices.
Yeah, the two main reasons I don’t switch back to America is because the prices are much cheaper for China and when I tried it I got a message saying I had to wait a few months before switching regions again. So I’ve just left it on China and get Chinese citizens to pay for the games then send them money on WeChat.