Valve To Turn On Its Steam Spigot In China This Year

Valve has been busy of late rolling out new features and thinking hard about how it will handle controversial games. One of the cool new features was Steam Link, an app that allows you to stream games from your PC over to your mobile device under the right circumstances. In addition, Valve recently offered insight into its decision to allow "everything" onto the Steam store short of illegal content and "straight up trolling." Valve has now announced that it will be opening the doors to Steam China this year.

The launch of Steam China is in partnership with Perfect World Zhengqi Multimedia Technology Co. Ltd. and Perfect World Game Co. The partnership will provide Chinese gamers access to the massive library of Steam games and entertainment. The companies are clear that as of now there is no specific launch date for Steam China.

The new partnership is an extension of an existing deal that gave Perfect World's subsidiaries rights to operate the Valve game DOTA 2 in the country. That deal was later expanded to include the ability to operate Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in China as well. With the new extended Steam China partnership, more games will be offered to fans in the country.

Perfect World and Valve will "collaborate closely on Steam China" with active promotion of the launch of the service, marketing, and game lineup. The move into China will have no impact on Steam operations in other countries. It's not clear if the deal will see all the over 20,000 Steam games landing in China or if only specific titles will be offered. Steam China has no specific launch date but is expected to launch this year.