the Online Safety Act just rewired how Steam works in Britain. mature store pages, trailers and community hubs are behind a credit-card age check — and your past purchases don't count as proof.
If you're in the UK and you click on a mature-rated game on Steam, you may now hit a wall that asks for a credit card before it will show you the store page. This isn't Valve being cautious — it's compliance with the UK's Online Safety Act, and it applies at the point of access to essentially any adult-rated content on the platform.
18+ store pages
What's gated
plus mature trailers and community hubs
credit card
Verification method
Ofcom deems it 'highly effective'
don't count
Past purchases
owning 18+ games isn't proof of age
Xbox
Also affected
rolling out its own UK age checks
What is actually behind the gate
The check applies to 18+ PEGI-rated store pages, mature trailers, mature-tagged community content, and the adult-only section of the store. That's broader than it first sounds: it's not just buying a game, it's looking at it. A user who wants to read about a horror or violent title — with no intention of purchasing — has to verify first. And notably, having previously bought mature games on the same account does not satisfy the requirement; prior purchase history isn't accepted as proof of age.
Why a credit card, and why people are uneasy
The Act requires age assurance that regulators consider 'highly effective,' and Ofcom treats credit-card verification as meeting that bar (card issuers already require account holders to be adults). The friction is obvious: handing card details to a storefront purely to view a page is a meaningful privacy ask, and it's generated real backlash among users who see it as normalising identity checks for browsing. It also lands as an industry-wide scramble rather than a Valve-specific policy — Xbox is rolling out its own UK checks in parallel.
Whatever you make of the policy, the practical reality for UK users is simple: mature content on Steam is now gated behind an identity-adjacent check, and it isn't going away. It's the clearest example yet of online-safety regulation reshaping how a storefront works, and other markets watching the UK's rollout will be taking notes.
