Steam Mass Ban Has Completely Changed Everything
This will be a major blow for some customers
With Steam facing an ongoing battle with adult game bans, it seems as though a recent development has made one payment method completely defunct.
Following the UK’s Online Safety Act that went into effect earlier this year and now the mass banning of adult games on Steam’s PC storefront, political groups and activists are cracking down on adult content online.
Although this is in an effort to protect children (or so they say), the new laws are having a dramatic effect on companies such as Valve as Steam has recently taken a major hit.
Back in July, Steam deleted a large number of games from its library which featured any adult or controversial themes.
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Reportedly, this was in an attempt to keep payment partners such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal from cutting ties.
However, as you can imagine, this has left developers in a difficult position as they are now unsure what constitutes “adult” or “controversial” and certain titles are being deleted with no warning.
Not only that but earlier this month, it has been reported that PayPal is no longer available on Steam across certain regions. As of now, only payments in Euro, Canadian Dollar, British Pound, Japanese Yen, Australian Dollar, and US Dollar are still eligible.
According to a subsequent report by Valve, PayPal was removed due to one of its acquiring banks no longer supporting and processing all Steam currencies and so residents from these regions will no longer have access to it.
Valve has not yet confirmed if PayPal will return across all currencies but it has suggested that those affected should either use other payment options or make use of Steam Wallet codes instead.
As an avid PayPal user, I can see how this would be a major blow for the PC storefront, not to mention having to grapple with the brand new adult-content laws.
It remains to be seen how this will affect Valve in the long run.