This is ridiculous

Is this malicious compliance?

All in the name of thinking of the children. Doesn't it just make you proud to be Australian?

Seriously though, screw these age-restricted codes being spewed and being an inconvenience to everyone on this part of the marble.

I can't say I've run into this yet. Perhaps it is because I'm not using my ISP DNS? That does bypass every other Australian restriction (blocked sites and such).

Hey, look at that, Steam is now the service problem.

Way to go AusGov. Pretty likely my Steam account is over 18. FWIW can still play owned games (for now).

ETA: I stand corrected on the AusGov thing (sort of, rather age checking wasn't there at all personally, and the way they implemented it makes abuse likely by leaving it to the corpos, Steam's not getting my license either).

Definitely a Steam is now the service problem (a reference to Steam calling piracy a service problem, live long enough to become the villain...) given history in the UK though.

Really? I don’t have a credit card as the options on a visa are not that great.

Don't be too quick to blame the Australian govt for this one, this is another case of malicious compliance from Valve - they want that outcome, as is clear in their Steam Support response screenshots going around that shift the blame entirely to the 'Australian govt eSafety codes'.

What they ignore is that by doing this, Steam is in breech of the codes that they're supposedly doing it to comply with. So.. I guess the ACCC will have to take Valve to court again.

The code terms mandate that age checks must be 'robust, reliable and fair'. Forcing people to get credit card accounts would not meet the code. It explicitly states "in order for age checks to be fair, service providers should offer more than one method of age checks to users".

This isn't a 'teething issue' either, Valve implemented the same user-hostile credit-card-only policy in the UK a year ago when the UK govt passed a similar law. Valve is still fighting compliance there too.

I don't seem to be affected by this and I dont own a credit card but it might just be that my steam account is old enough to vote?