Now that China has lifted the 13 year game console ban Chinese companies aren’t wasting any time launching new products to the virgin gamer market.
We have already seen that Huawei plan to launch an Android based gaming device and Sony are likely to launch the Playstation here at one some point this year too, however there will soon be a 3rd option in the shape of China’s first ever Steam box!
Gizchina News of the week
The Shimmei Steam Box which has been given the familiar name “Family Computer” is currently doing the rounds on Chinese tech sites. As is the norm with these earlier leaks, full details have not been exposed but it is believed the Shimmei with have a an 8-core AMD processor, 8GB DDR3 RAM 500GB of memory split between a traditional drive and SSD.
Analysts also believe that Lenovo could be working on a Steam Box to launch in the Chinese Mainland too.
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steambox being based on playing steam games, i don’t know if it will be popular in china, where the pirated software is king. a lot of my coworker in beijing likes to play games, but i dont think they ever paid for a software. they all play pirated copy of Warcraft 3 or starcraft. nobody knows about steam, and when i tried introducing it to them, they werent interested as soon as they heard they need to pay to download games.
but it might be a good start with how steam have a lot of cheap games and multiple sales.
that being said, the internet in china is still good enough to play multiplayer, and there are servers available for games like tf2.
It’s incredibly true. The China Chinese I work with seem pretty proud that they know how to not pay for games, and they are confused by my refusal to accept their pirated games. Even after explaining that I just want to support the developers. They just attributed it to the fact that I was a foreigner earning more than them and not knowing how to spend that extra money. Then again, it is quite disturbing to know the salary they are receiving.