Since May 7, gamers in Vietnam have been struggling with Steam. The Valve-owned game client started throwing errors and seemed unusable for thousands in the country. While many have been able to figure out ways to make Steam work, the sudden outage begs to be addressed via official communications.
VTC, the Vietnam Multimedia Corporation, a public company has been a target in the backlash. The VTC handles payments for Steam in Vietnam, with one of their VTC Pay e-Wallet options since 2018. Their recent Facebook posts have been blasted with hate comments, so much so that they had to limit who can comment on their posts.
Some speculate it’s due to the recent controversy around Steam when a Vietnam-based developer accused the company of releasing over 100,000 unauthorized games to the Vietnamese market, many of which are violent or adult in nature. Others say it’s because the government wants to integrate VAT (Value Added Tax) better, since Valve doesn’t have a local operating office in the country.
Users of major internet companies such as VNPT, FPT, and Viettel have together expressed their distaste regarding the matter. One forum user on Steam Community shared that they called their area manager regarding the issue and was told the “order came from above.”
I called two gaming cafes in Hanoi to verify if Steam’s working for them and both of them confirmed they’re facing no issues with the platform.
Regardless of how you see the issue and whether or not it will continue to persist in the coming days, here are a few ways people have been able to access Steam in Vietnam.
How to access Steam in Vietnam
The first step you could try is to change your DNS to that of Google’s, i.e., 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 or CloudFlare, i.e., 1.1.1.1.
In terms of payment methods, only Visa and MasterCard seems to be working as of now, with other methods such as VTC Pay, Internet Banking, and Domestic Credit Cards are resulting in failed transactions.
One user speculates Steam might be using a CDN for their content so the IP will change over time. They recommend running either of these commands:
nslookup store.steampowered.com, or dig store.steampowered.com
Another gaming website, GameFAQs seems to have been blocked as well.
A user from Ho Chi Minh City mentioned the following solution:
- Change your DNS to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4
- Use CloudFlare WARP
- Open Command Prompt and “ping store.steampowered.com” to get the IP
- Do an “ipconfig /flushdns”
- Go to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
- Put a new line at the end of the file like this: <steam ip> store.steampowered.com
- Put your steam IP without the <>.
They’ve warned users not to purchase games using a VPN as it might result in your account getting blocked.
Multiple VNPT users have updated that the game client is working for them after having issues with it for the past two days.
We’ll update you when there’s a new update regarding the situation. Feel free to discuss your queries in the comments below.
