Steam Age Verification Causes Headaches in Some Regions

The recent trend of government-mandated online age verification to access certain online content appears to be throwing a proverbial spanner in the works for Steam gamers, as shown by a recent Reddit post by a Steam user, u/Zekromisblack, in r/Steam. The Australian Steam user was prompted to create the post when they were unable to view a game on Steam because their age had not yet been verified via Steam—a process now required to view age-gated content on the gaming platform.

The bigger issue at hand was that Steam had no way to verify their age, because the user did not have a credit card saved to their Steam account. When contacting Steam Support about the age verification process, Steam's official response was that credit card age verification was the only method available at the time of writing. As highlighted by the original post and echoed by many commenters, credit cards are becoming increasingly less common in certain countries, especially among younger consumers, which may present a problem when it comes to viewing game content online. Read full story