Photo: Bokeh / Tomedia. Night Street with Speed Limit Sign.
I just had to do a dirty to buy a game.
Well, DLC for a game I already own. RimWorld: Odyssey. I have the base game, all the previous expansions, roughly 500 games in my Steam library and an account I’ve been using for thirteen years. I wanted to give the same shop some more money and then go back to managing a colony of people with considerably worse problems than mine.
Steam wanted a credit card to prove I was an adult.
I don’t have a credit card. I don’t want a credit card. I don’t particularly like the idea of having access to debt, so I’ve chosen to avoid it. Personal preference. Until now, that seemed like a fairly ordinary decision that didn’t need to get involved in whether I could buy a video game.
Apparently we have found a way to make it involved.
The age check I was offered left me stuck. I ended up buying a key through G2A, which is a ridiculous outcome when I had gone directly to Steam with the intention of paying for something there. I wasn’t looking for an adventure through third-party key marketplaces. I wanted an expansion.
I already bought the bloody game
I love RimWorld. I’ve also spent enough time playing it to start thinking about all the things I wish it did differently, which is how Juniper, my own colony-game experiment with an AI character in it, has become another project I’m apparently building. That is its own ramble. The relevant part here is that I am quite clearly still interested in buying RimWorld.
Owning it already didn’t get me through this check. Neither did thirteen years of using the account. I know an old account isn’t conclusive proof of the age of whoever is sitting at the computer today. I’m still allowed to find the experience absurd when the shop has happily taken my money for years and suddenly the thing it needs from me is a financial product I don’t want.
PC Gamer reported the Australian credit-card requirement earlier this month. There are also reports that some debit cards work, depending on the card and bank. That’s lovely for the people whose cards happen to qualify. It doesn’t make the route Steam offered me usable.
I shouldn’t need to apply for credit or change banks to satisfy a game shop that I’m old enough to buy an expansion. Being an adult and being a credit-card customer are two different things.
The law didn’t choose this checkout
I’ve been lumping a lot of this together as the Australian age ban, because from my end it feels like the same check following me around the internet. The Steam requirement comes from the Age-Restricted Material Codes under the Online Safety Act. The under-16 social-media restrictions are separate. Steam isn’t on eSafety’s current list of services covered by that social-media restriction.
That distinction matters when we start asking who decided a credit card was the answer. The codes don’t prescribe one particular method. eSafety’s guidance says services should offer more than one way to check age so people aren’t unfairly excluded. Valve has a choice in how it implements this.
I’ve had age prompts on Substack and PlayStation too, including after previously buying adult-rated games. PlayStation offers facial scanning or ID verification for its Australian check. I’m hardly excited about those options either, but it demonstrates that everybody isn’t being ordered to build the same credit-card gate.
So yes, I am annoyed at Valve. I am also annoyed at a government and regulator rolling out requirements that adults now have to navigate just to carry on buying things. Industry writes the codes, eSafety registers and enforces them, platforms implement the checks, and the customer gets to find out where the whole arrangement falls over.
The government can insist that lawful access for adults is being preserved. I’d like that to survive contact with an actual checkout.
Meanwhile, we still have actual gambling
The gaming restrictions have also reached a point where Australian GTA Online players have reported losing access to the casino games. The exact reason for Rockstar’s decision wasn’t confirmed in that reporting, so I’m not going to pretend the government personally ordered someone to switch off virtual blackjack.
I can see the argument about simulated gambling introducing people to gambling. The absence of a real-money cash-out doesn’t settle every question about how those systems work, either. But I find the contrast with the gambling advertising we live with in Australia pretty hard to take.
If we’re serious about gambling harm, I want that seriousness directed at the actual industry and the advertising that keeps pushing it at us. It’s hard to be impressed by losing a casino mini-game while real betting remains such a normal part of watching sport.
And I am getting very tired of ordinary purchases becoming another test of which account, payment method or identity check a platform has decided to accept this week. I understand wanting children protected. I also want to be able to buy a game as an adult without reorganising my finances around the verification method.
Honestly, this makes me miss physical copies. DRM-free copies too. Pay for the game, take it home, play it. Digital shops were supposed to make that easier, and now I’m going elsewhere to get a key for the shop I was trying to use in the first place.
Valve needs to give people who don’t have an accepted credit card a usable alternative. The government and eSafety need to check that their promise of continued access for adults actually works for those people. I wanted to buy RimWorld: Odyssey with money I already have. That should be an ordinary purchase.