Valve has announced a new process for validating the age of users and comply with the UK’s controversial Online Safety Act. Thankfully, Valve’s path to confirm your age is much less intrusive than the one we’ve seen many social media companies and tech giants taking.
Update 31/08 – After initial success stories, it now seems that debit cards are not usable for age verification. This makes Valve’s chosen system much more problematic, given the lower rates of credit card ownership and usage within the UK compared to the US and other countries. Our original reporting continues.
From now on, UK-based users looking to visit Steam store pages for mature rated games and their community hubs will require you to be logged into an active user account and opt-in for mature content. This does mean there’s no more blindly clicking through a quick date picker without logging in, which was useful for casually browsing.
Of course, this will now need a new process to verify a user’s age, and in the UK your age is considered verified so long as there is a valid credit or debit card stored on the account – while Valve stated “credit card”, banks issue different debit cards to customers who are above and below 18 years of age and perform age and identity checks for their accounts, so they should still provide the same age checks in this process.
This stands in stark contrast to AI-based age guesstimation using phone cameras – some of which were initially fooled by the photo mode in Death Stranding – or demands for passport and drivers licenses to validate. Steam is a storefront, so it’s reasonable to expect a payment method for validation. As excessive as the legislation is, both for the demands being imposed on companies, users and online communities and for the dampening effect this has on important kinds of speech and knowledge, this is a relatively low key approach from Valve.
It is, however, a shame that other options are not available. Age verification on Xbox is to be fully enforced from early 2026, and you can prove your age using government-issued ID, age estimation, mobile provider check, or credit card checks. I’d like to see Valve add mobile checks as well – you need to provide a phone number as part of adding a credit card anyway, and that’s also a decent datapoint.
Valve commits to processing this data in a manner that is identical to their rest of its data processing for purchases and payments, using an internal payment processing system that meets PCI-DSS standards. If, however, your given card fails the age check, you will need to contact your bank and go through a Steam support process.
Here’s the process for Steam users to follow:
- Log into your Steam user account.
- Visit the Account Details page and click the button labeled “Add a Payment method to this account”.
- You will be redirected to a form where you are asked to enter your credit card details.
Required inputs:- Credit Card type
- Credit card number
- CVV
- Expiry date
- Name and billing address
- Click “Continue” to trigger a £0 authorization.
- You will be presented with a challenge that is determined by your card issuing bank’s policies, e.g. via one-time-password (OTP) or via app.
- If the process is successful, you can now choose to add previously unavailable mature content types on the Store Preferences page.
Source: Steam
