Somewhere in Australia there is a gamer’s Steam library in which a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 sits paid for and owned — and, since September 9, unplayable. The gamer told nine.com.au they can no longer access games they already own. The lock on the library door is not a bug. It is an age check, and it is the shape that lock takes that has put Valve, Steam’s owner, between Australia’s online-safety regulator and a large share of its own adult customers.
More than two and a half million Australians use Steam. Under Australia’s Age-Restricted Material Codes, which came into effect on September 9, the platform introduced an age verification step for R18+ games. The method it chose was the credit card — the only form of verification Steam is currently accepting. Debit cards, reportedly, do not work. An adult without a credit card is, for the purposes of the system, indistinguishable from a child.
The arithmetic of the card
The Australian comparison site Finder put the number of credit cards in the country, as of July, at 12,155,300. The adult population is 21,455,550. Set one figure against the other and at least 43 percent of Australian adults cannot be holding a card — and the true share of the cardless is likely higher, since many cardholders carry more than one. The chosen gate, in other words, is one that approaching half the adult population cannot pass through.
The result is an inversion of what the codes were written to do. As Reclaim The Net put it, the intention may have been to protect children, but the effect is that some adults are now being treated like children, denied access to games they are legally entitled to play.
What the commissioner wants
Curiously, Valve’s sparse solution has satisfied no one. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is not happy with Steam’s method either, though for a different reason. “Steam providing a single form of age assurance, namely credit cards, which many Australians may not have access to, is unlikely to meet the ‘fairness’ requirement contained in these terms,” an eSafety spokesperson said.
The terms in question belong to the APP Code, under which companies such as Microsoft, Sony and Valve “are required to ensure that from September 9, games on their stores that are classified R18+ are not able to be purchased or downloaded by Australian children.” The codes themselves, the spokesperson noted, were “collectively written by more than 70 members of the online industry, including major gaming studios, device manufacturers and app stores.”
eSafety is now “engaging with Valve and seeking commitments from the company that it will put in place additional forms of age assurance to give its customers choice.” Other stores, the spokesperson said, have managed to “introduce a broad suite of age assurance options, mostly avoiding the issues being highlighted by Steam customers.”
The alternatives on the table
There is, in the regulator’s own account, a menu. “Microsoft allows those purchasing games on its store to verify using a range of methods including email-based verification, facial age estimation, official document scan and credit card. Sony, Apple and Google also provide a variety of options for users to complete age assurance,” the spokesperson said.
Read that list again: email verification, a face scan, a photograph of identity documents, or plastic. The regulator that finds a credit-card-only system unfair is, by its own framing, pressing a company toward facial age estimation as the accommodating alternative. The Social Media Minimum Age legislation, the spokesperson pointed out, “makes it clear that any form of identification for under-18s must include options other than a government ID or credit card” — a legal architecture that points decidedly in the direction of biometrics. Steam’s reluctance to photograph its customers’ faces, if that is what its single-method approach amounts to, is not hard to understand, even at the cost of the commissioner’s displeasure.
Malicious compliance, or trolling
On the Steam Community forum, users have settled on a phrase for the credit-card-only gate: “malicious compliance” — the letter of the law obeyed in a way that exposes its awkwardness. Australian tech commentator Trevor Long has gone a step further, wondering aloud whether the whole arrangement is “trolling” on Valve’s part.
Some frustrated users are talking about switching their account region with a VPN to slip past the restriction altogether. For those who prefer to stay Australian, the official remedy is modest: affected customers are advised to lodge a “manual support ticket” with Steam. Somewhere in the queue of tickets, presumably, is the owner of that locked copy of Cyberpunk 2077 — legally adult, legally entitled, and waiting on a card they do not have.