Steam's age check locks out half of Australian adults

If you're an Australian Steam user who tried to open Cyberpunk 2077's store page this week and hit a wall, you're not imagining things. Valve just switched on age verification for R18+ titles, and it only trusts one thing to prove you're an adult: a working credit card.

You can still launch R18+ games; you already own your library, which stays open. What you lose access to is the store page itself and the ability to buy anything new, though community and discussion pages for those games remain visible. So if you already had Doom: The Dark Ages installed before this rolled out, you're fine. If you were hoping to pick it up this week, you're stuck.

Debit cards don't work. PayPal doesn't work. Neither does having owned your account for a decade. You need an active Australian credit card linked to your profile, and it has to stay linked. Remove it, and your account reverts to unverified.

That matters because only about half of Australian consumers hold a credit card at all, and among 18-to-24-year-olds, the age group most likely to be gaming, ownership drops to roughly a quarter.

How this stacks up against PlayStation, Xbox and Epic?

You would have far more choices if you tried elsewhere. PlayStation, Xbox and Epic make use of facial age estimation and the verification by government ID using external verification services provided by Yoti, while Xbox goes one step further and also allows email verification. However, Valve currently does not offer any of these choices yet.

In case you do not have an eligible card, all hope is not lost since some gamers are purchasing keys for R18+ games on third-party stores such as Fanatical or Green Man Gaming and then activating them via Steam, thereby bypassing the store page blocking mechanism entirely.