Steam sees Chinese users outnumber English-speaking users by significant margin as Chinese market interests shift beyond mobile games
Valve recently published the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey. According to the figures, August 2024 saw Chinese-speaking users outnumber English-speaking users by an unprecedented margin.
Simplified Chinese is a language with an extremely large user population on Steam to begin with, usually coming in second after English and leading over Russian by a margin of more than 20%. In fact, Chinese briefly took the top spot from English in February 2024, but the difference was a mere 0.7%. However, according to Valve’s August data, the number of players using the platform in Simplified Chinese increased by a further 3%, taking the top spot with a lead of about 4% over English.
An undeniable reason for this is the strong performance of the Chinese-produced Black Myth: Wukong, which launched on August 20. The title has become the second largest game ever on Steam with more than 2.41 million concurrent players (SteamDB). Furthermore, cumulative sales exceeded 10 million units in the first three days after launch. According to GameDiscoverCo, Chinese users made up approximately 88% of Black Myth: Wukong’s Day 1 playerbase on Steam. This may be what pushed the total Chinese-speaking user count to the top spot.
In recent years, the Chinese market has seen a trend of free-to-play mobile games being popular. Game Science, the studio behind Black Myth: Wukong, also previously worked on F2P games such as Art of War: Red Tides. Black Myth: Wukong is the studio’s first large-scale development project, and it seems to be signaling that some Chinese-speaking players are moving towards full price PC games. On a related note, big Chinese publishers such as Tencent and NetEase seem to have set their sights on seizing this new momentum in the domestic scene, which has, as a by-product, caused them to lose interest in investing in Japanese games.
With more Chinese games coming to Steam in the upcoming period, such as S-GAME’s highly anticipated kung-fu action game Phantom Blade Zero, Chinese-speaking Steam users may increase even more in the future.
