Despite the staggering growth seen in China’s gaming market, it is becoming increasingly difficult for foreign games to operate in the country. Last year, the government granted licences to a total of 1,413 games, of which only 97 were developed abroad.

Before last year, Apple’s App Store was the only other big online game store in addition to Steam which had unlicensed games on its digital shelves.

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“The international version of Steam operates in a grey area,” Ahmad said. “This is how a number of developers reach the China market, going through the international version of Steam, rather than the long and cumbersome approval process for an official release that requires a Chinese partner or publisher.”

Ahmad estimated in 2018 that Steam had more than 30 million users in China. But rather than celebrating the launch of a local version of Steam, the platform’s tremendous user base reacted to the announcement largely with dismay.

“Please don’t come to China,” a Weibo user wrote in the wake of Perfect World’s announcement.

“Good games can’t get approved. We can’t play what we want to play,” another user wrote. “Sooner or later, Steam will have to go under in China.”

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Serkan Toto, chief executive of game industry consultancy Kantan Games, said Steam China’s launch felt like déjà vu.

“We had a very similar situation when Tencent launched the Switch in China, bringing a popular grey-market platform to the country officially after several years,” Toto said.

“PC gaming is so big in China that Steam‘s official version sure will find an audience, just by virtue of the size of the market,” Toto said. “However, I doubt that many of the current users will switch to the domestic version – unless it gets exclusive blockbusters sometime down the line.”

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At the same time, the odds are stacked against Steam’s international version remaining available in China for long, according to Owen Soh, founder of game consultancy EastLab Consulting.

“Steam International’s days [in China] are numbered,” Soh said, “But perhaps it would take two to three years to shut down completely, following Apple’s App Store’s trajectory of finding the balance of working with regulations and having critical mass of licensed products.”

That said, experts also expect Chinese gamers will find workarounds to bypass the country’s regulations to access foreign games in the event of Steam being blocked.

“There is strong demand for overseas games from Chinese users. Chinese gamers will find a way, be it a VPN (virtual private network) or an alternative store, to play these games,” Ahmad said.

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The demand has become so strong that even tech giants such as Tencent and NetEase have launched their own game booster software and services. Whenever a game is banned by the authorities, the downloads of these tools spike, as Chinese gamers engage in a cat-and-mouse game with regulators.

“Users will always find a way to play the games they want, and this goes double for PC where players are generally more sophisticated than on other platforms like mobile,” Toto said.

“So [for Steam China] Perfect World will need to think hard how to incentivise Chinese gamers – probably an uphill battle, at least in the early days.”