Age Verification for Steam rolls out in Australia requiring a Credit Card

9 Sep 2026 at 7:08 am UTC | Last updated: 9 Sep 2026 at 8:32 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Valve have rolled out Age Verification requirements on Steam in Australia for 18+ content, requiring users to keep a Credit Card on their account.

Debit Cards don't work, and there's no other form of verification accepted by Valve currently - which has already proven to be an issue for people in the UK as plenty of people do not have a Credit Card. You have to keep the card linked to the account too, it doesn't just do a one-time verify - so if you remove the card you're back to having an under 18 account.

This means games like Cyberpunk 2077 and many others cannot be viewed at all:

The message reads:

Valve is required by the Age-Restricted Material App Distribution Services Code to verify that you are 18 or older before accessing mature content. If you wish to do so, please add a valid Australian credit card to your account and afterwards update the Mature Content Preferences.

When Valve originally rolled this out for the UK they said doing it this way "preserves the maximum degree of user privacy" instead of requiring ID or face scans.

Hopefully Valve will eventually add other methods - so that people can pick how they want to verify, rather than be forced into one way that's not accessible to everyone.

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