Steam age verification and adult games: the rules in the UK, Australia and the US

Since 29 August 2025, Steam users in the United Kingdom need a valid credit card stored on their account before the store will show them pages for mature games. In September 2026 Steam introduced the same kind of check in Australia for games classified R18+. Both changes come from national online safety laws, and both use card ownership as the proof of age.

This page explains what Steam requires in each country, which law is behind it, how the United States differs, and what the rules mean for people who make or sell adult games. It is a summary of public sources and is not legal advice.

Key points

• UK: the Online Safety Act requires “highly effective” age checks for content that is harmful to children. Steam’s answer is a stored credit card.
• Australia: an industry code overseen by the eSafety Commissioner requires app stores to check age for R18+ material. Steam again uses a credit card.
• Debit cards are not accepted in either country.
• United States: the laws target websites where more than a third of the content is sexually explicit, so they bear on explicit sites much more than on general game stores.
• A studio website with no explicit content sits outside most of these duties. A site that hosts explicit material does not.

What Steam asks for, country by country

The United Kingdom

What the law requires

The Online Safety Act puts duties on online services that can be accessed from the UK. The government’s explainer sets out the timetable: Ofcom, the regulator, published its age assurance guidance in January 2025, and the duties to protect children from harmful content took full effect in summer 2025. Services that allow sexually explicit content must use what the Act calls highly effective age assurance to keep children from seeing it.

The penalties explain why companies moved quickly. A company can be fined up to £18 million or 10 percent of its qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater.

Ofcom’s guidance lists methods it considers capable of being highly effective. They include credit card checks, photo ID matching, facial age estimation, open banking and checks through a mobile network operator. Asking a user to tick a box or type a date of birth does not count.

What Steam did

On 29 August 2025 Steam began requiring UK users to opt in before seeing mature content. As reported by TheSixthAxis and Neowin, the process is to sign in and store a valid credit card on the account. A UK account counts as age verified for as long as a valid credit card stays on it.

Valve’s reasoning, as quoted in those reports, has two parts. First, a person must be at least 18 to get a credit card in the UK, and the bank has already checked that. Second, Valve says the method preserves the most privacy: the card is handled like any other payment, and the check tells payment providers nothing about what a user looks at.

The check covers store pages for mature games and the community hubs attached to them.

The problem for people without a credit card

Not every adult has a credit card. Early reports suggested debit cards might work, and an update to the TheSixthAxis report two days later said they did not. People who wrote to Steam support were told that verification based on credit card ownership was the only path Valve could offer under the Act.

That leaves a group of adults who are old enough to buy the games and cannot see them. TheSixthAxis contrasted this with Xbox, which offers several methods. Steam, at the time of these reports, offered one.

Australia

Australia reached the same point a year later by a different route. Its online safety system uses industry codes that are registered and enforced by the eSafety Commissioner. One of them, the Age-Restricted Material App Distribution Services Code, covers app stores.

According to Game Developer and Checkpoint Gaming, Steam began asking Australian users to verify their age on 9 September 2026, when the deadline for app stores arrived. The message shown to users 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.”

The check applies to games that carry Australia’s R18+ classification. The accepted proof is a valid Australian credit card. PayPal, debit cards and identity documents are not accepted. Game Developer reported that Valve had not responded to its request for comment, and noted the same complaint as in the UK: plenty of Australian adults use debit cards only.

The United States

The United States has no national law of this kind. It has a growing number of state laws, and the important fact about them is what they are aimed at.

Texas law HB 1181 requires commercial websites to verify that visitors are 18 or older if more than one third of the site’s content is “sexual material harmful to minors”. On 27 June 2025 the US Supreme Court upheld that law by six votes to three in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The Court held that requiring adults to prove their age is an incidental burden on their speech and that the law survives the level of review that applies.

More than twenty states have passed laws on the same model, and the Free Speech Coalition’s tracker follows them.

For games, the one-third threshold is what matters. A general game store, where adult titles are a small share of the catalogue, is unlikely to cross it. A website given over to explicit games could cross it easily. That is why these laws weigh more heavily on dedicated adult game sites than on Steam.

What this means if you play

• In the UK and Australia, you will need a credit card on your Steam account to see mature or R18+ store pages.
• The card has to be valid and stay stored on the account. Removing it removes the verification.
• If you have no credit card, the options at the time of writing were to wait for Valve to add another method or to raise it with the regulator. Steam support could not offer an alternative.
• Other stores make their own choices. A store that sells into the UK or Australia has the same duties and may meet them with a different method.

What this means if you make or sell adult games

• Selling through a store puts the duty on the store. The effect on you is that fewer people in the affected countries can see your page.
• Selling from your own site puts the duty on you. If the site hosts explicit content and can be accessed from the UK, the Online Safety Act’s age assurance duties apply. If more than a third of it is explicit, the US state laws may apply too.
• A site with no explicit content carries far fewer duties. This is one reason studios keep their main site safe for work and put explicit material behind a separate, age-checked address.
• Classification matters more than it did. In Australia the gate is tied to the R18+ classification, so how a game is classified now decides who can see its page.

What is still unsettled

• Whether Steam will add a second method in either country. No announcement had been reported when this page was written.
• How regulators will treat stores that sell adult games but are not primarily adult sites.
• How many more US states will pass laws, and whether any will lower the one-third threshold.

How this page was put together

The legal summaries come from government publications and from law firms’ notes on the Supreme Court decision. The descriptions of what Steam does come from news reports that quote Valve’s help pages and support replies, because Valve has not published a press statement on either change. Where a detail was corrected after first publication, as with debit cards in the UK, this page uses the corrected version.

It was written on 2 October 2026 and will be updated when Steam changes its method or a regulator publishes new guidance. To report an error, see the corrections standard.