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Steam is very much a global gaming platform, and now, Mandarin is the most-used language on it.
According to new Steam stats posted during its GDC 2025 talk (as reported by Game Discover), over 66% of Steam users have something other than English set as their primary language. The most-popular is now Mandarin, specifically Simplified Chinese, with 33.7% of gamers using it as their go-to dialect compared to 33.5% using English and 1% using Cantonese.
The largest number of Mandarin speakers in the world are in China, where recent games like Black Myth: Wukong have invigorated the domestic games market and gotten more people into PC and console gaming. One developer says this has been a long time coming, as "we've wanted to make these kinds of games from the beginning."
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Games like Genshin Impact, Infinity Nikki, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero have also been hugely successful for Chinese companies, and Tencent is a Chinese gaming giant with its fingers in a lot of pies. A lot of these games are on mobile and PC, but Wukong has proven, louder than ever, that console and PC games are worth making too.
China also has some fantastic animators and a lot of manpower according to Japanese video game developers. They say, "if you've been involved in Chinese game projects, you'll know that they use 10x more money and manpower than Japan – the scale is incomparable." They also note that the Chinese industry is more "free-spirited," and "crazy" ideas that "would never get approved in Japan" are more common.
But it won't just be China pushing the number of Mandarin speakers on Steam up. It's widely spoken in Taiwan, although many other languages are used by its residents, including Cantonese. There's also a high number of Mandarin speakers in other Asian countries such as Singapore and Malaysia, and I heard a fair amount in South Korea and Vietnam when I visited in 2023.
While you're here, check out our list of the best action games you can play right now to satiate that Black Myth itch.
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I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.
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