Valve has started to comply with the UK’s Online Safety Act, by rolling out a requirement for all Brits to verify their age with a credit card to access “mature content” pages and games on Steam. UK users won’t even be able to access the community hubs of mature content games unless a valid credit card is stored on a Steam account.
While platforms like Reddit, Bluesky, and Discord have opted for age verification checks using selfies, Valve is restricting its age checks to just credit cards. “Among all age assurance mechanisms reviewed by Valve, this process preserves the maximum degree of user privacy,” says Valve in a support article. “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.”
In the UK you need to be 18 years of age to obtain a credit card, so this passes the age checks onto banks instead of Valve having to perform them. If you don’t have a credit card then you won’t be able to access mature content games or pages on Steam, as there’s no other way of verifying your age.
Valve’s decision to require a credit card comes weeks after the UK’s new age-gating rules have been found to be easy to bypass, especially with VPNs. Discord and Reddit’s UK age verification could be briefly defeated by Death Stranding’s photo mode, but the face scanning tools have since been updated to block this bypass method.
Microsoft has also started rolling out Xbox age verification in the UK. While the age verification checks are optional right now, they will become a requirement to access a variety of Xbox services in early 2026, when additional parts of the UK’s Online Safety Act come into force.