If your Steam account is nine years old, it now [edit to add: should] auto verify.
Doesn’t do me any good, my account is just shy of six years old, and my MC debit card still doesn’t work. I’ll be 60 before it auto verifies unless my debit card magically starts working.
There must be some under 18s whose parents got them a steam account nine years ago who are now verified.
I have the 21 years of service badge on my account, those cunts tried to get me to age verify to view a store page recently!
The reply I got when I whinged at them about a similar complaint was:
I understand your concern with this. For now, verification based on credit card ownership is the only path Steam currently offers for age verification under the Age-Restricted Material Online Safety Codes.
We are continuing to gather data on potential pain points for users and will take your feedback back to the team. We are sorry for the inconvenience this requirement is causing for you.
Did it verify with today’s change? (I think it was today, that when I started seeing the new page.) I’d trigger the age verify every so often in case my debit card finally worked.
Nah, this was a couple of weeks ago for me now.
Fingers crossed for you. :)
Hot take. It shouldn’t matter if your account is old, and it’s a good thing that people get frustrated by it, because it shouldn’t be a thing and public unpopularity is the only way to make it not a thing. Don’t be content with a bad thing just because you’re exempt.
Yet again, Australia is the testing ground for anti-privacy authoritarian legislation.
And most Australians are far too apathetic and ignorant to understand or care about the danger.
It took no real effort at all to set the framing as not if, but how to implement the social media ban, when “if” should never have been a question.
Why do ppl still simp for steam and valve so much? They bend the knee to oppressive internet just like everyone else.
The fact that they auto verify based on account age is already better than most sites handle this. Valve isn’t above the law, they can either bend the knee or entirely remove themselves from the Australian market and revoke access for any Australian account permanently. They chose the former and used the least intrusive verification option that is legally acceptable after a few weeks of implementation.
What would your solution be for them, delete every Australian account in hopes that it pisses people off enough to trigger a revolution?
refuse to implement it and dare the government to block them
or take payment via crypto and serve content via tor
And that goes for any company that’s being bullied into censoring the internet “for kids”
refuse to implement it and dare the government to block them
That works with very small and unimportant countries, but Australia has already shown that they are somehow influential enough that MasterCard and visa threaten storefronts for them. It was barely a year ago that steam and itch were forced to temporarily unlist ero games or loose access to most payment providers.
take payment via crypto and serve content via tor
Great way to get into a giant legal battle. Valve isn’t a piracy site owner that can just pack up and run away into a different jurisdiction. They will be brought to court with no way of winning this.
Not to mention that crypto is atrocious to do business with. Even the more stable coins are volatile enough that most of them would require dynamic pricing. And it also doesn’t remove the need for age verification since all non-shady/illegal exchanges require your full identity.
Valve is one of the most customer oriented companies out there (for now), but expecting them to fight a global censorship movement and essentially becoming an underground black market on the deep web is beyond stupid. The only companies nearly influential enough to do anything against that would be Alphabet (Google) or Microsoft.
It was the deal breaker for me. The end of my 21 year relationship with steam. I don’t give a shit that they’ve let me through because of the account age, the fact that they locked it down briefly and may do so again in the future means they can fuck right off
Better to maliciously comply than earnestly comply.
We need a Big Walk regular meetup. Someone get it going please.
I bitched at support about this very thing couple of weeks ago. I guess I wasn’t the only one and they listened.
Pretty much everyone I know had a rant at steam for the age gate. Felt bad for the support people, but felt toasty for the heat steam was getting.
It was a stupid policy from the start. I don’t feel sorry for them. I wasn’t rude, but I was pretty blunt.
My message:
Stop asking for credit card details just to look at ‘mature content’ that I may or may not even buy. The age of my account alone should tell you that I’m over 18.
And this was for a game that would let me look at the main game, but not the bundle with all the DLC for the same game.
I think I may have been cleared because I sent them the precursor to a consumer protections complaint because they wouldn’t refund a glitchy game. The account is not that old.
Great, now they want to know how old the cars are?
