PC gaming giant Valve has started to bow to the UK’s Online Safety Act, by requiring Steam users to verify their age with a credit card in order to access games with mature content.
“In order to access Steam store pages for mature content games as well as their associated community hubs, you need to be logged into an active user account and explicitly opt-in through the account settings page.” Steam’s Support page details. “For UK users, this opt-in process requires age verification. Your UK Steam user account is considered age verified for as long as a valid credit card is stored on the account.”
The Online Safety Act all stems from a goal to prevent children from seeing inappropriate, sexual or generally mature content across a myriad of online platforms and services. As such, users of services and sites that host mature content, even if not exclusively so, need to verify that they are 18 years of age or older.
Often this requires things like a facial scan or credit card details, which privacy-centric people might be concerned about parting with given verification tools can be delivered via third-party organizations with their own rules on data collection and use. Notably, a credit card is asked for as in the UK you need to be 18 years old to apply for one.
“Having the credit card stored as a payment method acts as an additional deterrent against circumventing age verification by sharing a single Steam user account among multiple persons,” noted Valve.
While I understand the need for such verification, and do hope that it will protect young people from some of the more unsavory content one can find online if so inclined, as a 38-year-old Steam user, it’s a minor annoyance and another hurdle to hop when logging into the gaming platform on different PCs or devices.
It’s also a bit annoying as there are still people who don’t have credit cards; for example, I only got one that I actually use back last year.
Protecting privacy
For people like me who can be a little iffy about handing over credit card details, Valve’s process is to have the credit card stored as a payment method so it won’t be using an off-platform third-party verification service, which should mean your credit card details are kept secure.
“The data processed in the verification process is identical to that of the millions of other Steam users who make purchases or store their payment details for convenience,” said Valve. “The verification process therefore provides no information about a user’s content preferences to payment providers or other third parties.”
So this makes me feel a little more comfortable with the whole thing, and should hopefully be a one-and-done process. I’ve become so used to how easy Steam is to use from making secure payment to logging in via the mobile app, so I do hope this adapting to the Online Safety Act won’t erode that feeling of ease.
It’ll be interesting to see if other countries follow the UK’s example or if Valve decides to roll out such verification for all users and a one-stop-shop way to allow ‘safe’ access to mature content. I guess time will tell.
