Steam users in the UK will need a credit card to access “mature content” games
Steam users in the UK will need a credit card to access “mature content” games
www.theverge.com
Steam users in the UK will need a credit card to access “mature content” games
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1204179
Steam is now complying with the Online Safety Act
That is actually a relatively mild solution that makes the age verification almost bearable...
...which is terrible, because age verification as a whole is a terrible concept. Would have been nice if a big player like Steam is working against it, but I also never expected they would, they are commercial after all.
I don't agree that it's mild. They explicitly will require credit cards as per the law, debit cards won't work for it, which is a huge deal.
I mean children can get debit cards. Having a bank account has never and should never be a bench mark of age.
Heaven sake I had a bank account at 12 years old.
Unsecured Credit should realistically be straight up illegal to give to children.
So no it's not a huge deal at fucking all. Unless you have a sizeable amount of financial literacy. And don't understand what a credit vs debit card actually mean.
At best you can make a weak argument that having to get a credit card is annoying. But 300-500 dollar low limit free credit card with no requirements or annual fees. Is available basically from every bank in the world.
Get it and throw it in a draw to rot for literally forever. Hell you can even cut it in half it and freeze the card. Making it a zero security risk.
Then you have a unusable, frozen account. That exists purely as proof that your old enough to have a credit card. Even if it's stolen it's unusable and still perfectly safe.
So you don't even have to care about data breaches beyond what you currently do.
How do you expect Steam to work against this? This is not a decision that Valve has any word on, its a decision by government. The only thing that Valve could do here is, remove those games for that country. But that is not a solution. If anything, the citizens of the UK should do something, if possible.
Honestly, if they removed those games then it'd get people riled up and hopefully get them to take action against this crap