Steam Language Statistics 2026

Simplified Chinese overtook English as the most-used language on Steam in 2024, Valve confirmed at GDC 2025. It was the first time that had happened on a full-year basis — English held the top position for most of the platform’s history. With 132 million monthly active users and growing participation from Asian markets, Steam’s language breakdown has real implications for how games get built and sold in 2026.

Steam Language Statistics 2026: Key Numbers

• Simplified Chinese is set as the primary language by 33.7% of Steam users in 2024, according to Valve data presented at GDC 2025.
• English sits at 33.5%, only 0.2 percentage points behind Simplified Chinese.
• Russian is the third-most used language on Steam at 8.2% of the user base.
• In February 2025, Simplified Chinese briefly reached 50.06% during Chinese New Year, the first time any language has exceeded half the Steam hardware survey’s respondents.
• Steam supports 28 languages globally and recorded 132 million monthly active users in 2025.

What Languages Do Steam Users Speak?

Valve’s internal data, shared at its GDC 2025 presentation, gives the most accurate breakdown of language settings across Steam accounts. Unlike the monthly hardware survey — which is voluntary and can spike sharply during regional events — this data represents full-year averages across 2024.

Source: Valve / GDC 2025 (via App2top, GameDiscoverCo)

The data covers the top 11 named languages plus a combined “other” category. The top four — Simplified Chinese, English, Russian, and Spanish — together account for roughly 80% of all Steam accounts.

How Did Simplified Chinese Become Steam’s Top Language?

This was not a sudden shift. The first time Simplified Chinese topped Steam’s monthly survey was in 2017, driven by the PUBG: Battlegrounds craze, when Chinese players briefly accounted for over 60% of the hardware survey’s respondents. That spike faded, and English reclaimed the lead.

The 2024 shift is different. Valve’s own internal data — not the volatile monthly survey — confirmed that Simplified Chinese averaged 33.7% for the full year, above English at 33.5%. The primary catalyst was Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese-developed action RPG that sold over 25 million copies in its first six months following an August 2024 release. It brought a wave of new accounts and returning Chinese players to the platform.

The effect was most visible in February 2025. During Chinese New Year (February 9–16), Steam’s hardware survey recorded Simplified Chinese at 50.06% — the first time any language had exceeded half the survey’s respondents in the platform’s history. English fell to around 29% that month.

Chinese is one of the world’s most spoken languages, and many users opt to learn Mandarin Chinese to better engage with its growing global presence. Steam’s data reflects this scale directly.

Steam Language Data vs. Actual User Locations

Language settings on Steam do not always match where a user lives. Analyst Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo noted that approximately 5.3% of Steam users are based in Germany, yet only 2.5% have their account set to German. That gap — more than double — means many German speakers use English as their Steam interface language.

France is an exception; French speakers and French-language accounts track closely at around 2.1% each. But Germany’s pattern suggests the platform’s real English-speaking audience is larger than its 33.5% language-setting figure implies.

Source: GameDiscoverCo via App2top; Valve hardware survey data

This matters for developers estimating reach. A game without a Russian localization still misses a market where roughly 8.2% of accounts are set to Russian — and where, unlike Germany, most players are unlikely to default to English.

Steam Language Statistics and Game Localization in 2026

Steam officially supports 28 languages, but most games on the platform cover far fewer. Research by Nimdzi found that 4,248 Steam games released as of 2020 were localized into just two languages. The practical localization priority for most developers has historically followed the FIGS grouping — French, Italian, German, Spanish — plus Russian and Simplified Chinese.

That calculus is shifting. Analysis by ECI Games across monthly Steam data from 2023 and 2024 found that Ukrainian now holds a larger share of the platform than Italian, a reversal of years of conventional localization priority. Meanwhile, Latin American Spanish grew by nearly 45% between 2023 and 2024, though its absolute share remains small at around 0.5%.

Korean (2.2%) and Japanese (1.7%) remain consistent targets for developers with Asian market ambitions, given those countries’ strong PC gaming cultures and high per-user spending. Brazilian Portuguese at 2.8% outranks both German and Korean individually, reflecting Brazil’s fast-growing gamer base — estimated at 102 million players as of the latest count.

Turkish (1.7%) has grown steadily as a localization target. With roughly 43 million gamers and over 80% of the population speaking only Turkish, it is one of the few markets where English-only games face a hard ceiling on potential reach.

For a broader look at language use across the internet and media, the English language statistics page covers how English competes with other languages beyond gaming. And for context on how Steam’s language spread compares to global speaker populations, the most common languages in the world tells a different story — one where Mandarin native speakers dwarf English by a wide margin.

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