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.
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”
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.
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.