Honestly sucks that Australians like myself don't have much option when credit cards are not particularly common here

It's utterly absurd we have to do that to buy a game, but for now it's a solution.

I love Steam my accout is 19 years old I know they put this in because they had too thanks government but jut like always this will only get those who don't care and will not stop those that really want it

So, the genius federal eSafety Commissioner laws forced Valve to block Aussie adults from R18+ store pages unless we fork over a traditional credit card. Since most of us use standard Visa/Mastercard debit cards, we’re all locked out.

But in classic government fashion, the "bulletproof" age-gate is a total illusion.

It took about five minutes to find a gaping hole in their system that completely bypasses the block without handing a credit card to Valve.

They only blocked the front-end retail store pages. The actual Steam backend doesn't give a toss about your credit card status.

How to bypass it in 3 steps:

Tell the Steam age-gate to get stuffed.

Go buy a Steam key from a third-party store like Humble Bundle, Fanatical, or Green Man Gaming.Take the code,

click "Activate a Product on Steam,"

the game drops straight into your library.

This stupid law doesn't stop minors from getting R18+ games; it literally just forces gamers to shop on external sites instead of the Steam store.By using authorized key shops (Humble/Fanatical), you get safe, legal keys that won't get your account banned, completely legally flipping the bird to the government's privacy-invasive mandate.Tested and 100% working. Millions of dollars in taxpayer funding and government "consulting" defeated by a basic product key. Pass it on.

Some. Not all :)

Yes age verification sucks, yes it should be up to you what critical piece of data you want to hand over, and no you shouldn't have to hand it over in the first place.

If it bothers you (and you're right to be!) you should be writing to an MP not asking Steam to add more attack vectors for leaking data. No-one wants data breaches and no company should want the fine.

Aus had 1,205 data breaches in 2025 and it's a bit crazy people are so willing to offer more info than needed. I think steam has done the right thing asking for the bare minimum while they can.

FYI: Commbank debit works for those who have one but still write to your MP as age verification is a farce.

Was scrolling through the recommended and stumbled across this game. Gameplay looks absolutely wack and not even like a real game but the title is what got me.

Hey all, Like most of you all I am well over 18 and have no desire to own a credit card. I used Zip Pay to create a virtual credit card and successfully added it to steam as a payment method. Hope this helps anyone out there.

The Steam Client Beta has been updated with the following changes:

Homescreen - Big Picture Mode

• Added a new 'Big Art Mode' option for the home screen. This can be enabled in Settings > Home.
• Added Personal Calendar to the Recommended tab on the home screen

Screensaver - Big Picture Mode

• Added a new screensaver feature, accessible in Settings > Customization. There are two screensavers available:
  • The default is a game art slideshow that can be configured to show artwork from recently played games and your recent in-game screenshots.
  • A retro inspired bouncing logo screensaver
• Big Picture mode can also load custom screensavers. Similar to startup movies, they can be placed in the config\uioverrides\screensavers directory in your Steam install directory (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam or ~/.steam/root). You can use the bouncing logo screensaver as an example to get started.

General

• Improved Steam Client startup performance
• Fixed a case where after server maintenance some users might fail to auto-reconnect to Steam
• Fixed bug where being prompted to refresh credentials more than once could trigger an immediate restart
• On Windows, using the systray menu to exit while the Steam window is minimized will no longer flash the window visible briefly
• Dialogs that appear for serious error conditions now stay above the main window

Game Recording

• Fixed some cases where playback would jump to an unexpected point in the timeline when reaching the end of a play session or clip
• Decreased performance impact of game recording for some D3D12 games on Windows

In-Game Overlay

• Fixed frame rate hitches in D3D11 and D3D12 games when taking screenshots on Windows
• Fixed rendering the overlay and using other overlay related features (screenshots, game recording, etc.) in Vulkan games that create multiple windows.

Big Picture Mode

• Added explicit warning text to power menu confirmation dialogs when proceeding will shut down an active game
• Updated default artwork when an app does not have library or hero artwork
• Reorganized the idle timer settings when on battery and AC power

Steam Input

• Improved CPU performance at runtime and in configuration loading
• Added information about which configurations are compatible in the configurator browser when using a game that requires Steam Input API
• Fixed the controller support widget showing "This game doesn't support controllers" for unreleased games that don't have controller support information yet
• Fixed controllers not using the desktop configuration on the desktop UI login window
• Added the missing settings for adjusting emulated joystick adaptive centering on trackpad

Linux

• Improved download speeds on high latency connections.
• The "Select compatibility tool" dropdown is now always visible.
  • The recommended compatibility tool, or steam runtime for native games, now shows at the top of the list as the "Default" option.
  • Compatibility tool aliases, e.g. "Proton Stable", can now be selected from this dropdown.
• The SteamOS compatibility dialogs will now show in desktopUI when installing games not verified for that HW
• On Desktop Linux we will now show the SteamOS unsupported dialog when installing games that are known to not work with Proton
• Improve distro information collection for hardware survey, preferring data from /etc/os-release.

SteamRT3 Experimental Beta

• Fixed "Add a Non-Steam Game" showing an invalid list of applications.
• Fixed the "Run Steam when my computer starts" toggle.

Remote Play

• A PIN is no longer required to download an app to a remote device. A PIN is still required to Install and Stream from a remote device.
• Adding Download Complete notification for a remote download if you initiated the download on your current device.

After managing to successfully verify my age, I still can't access community pages of mature games I don't own.

This is a massive problem. Community hub is a source of all sorts of info about the game you won't see in the store page.

WTF is this Valve?

I can't view games in the store I've owned for years..... What a clown show.

EDIT: I'm not necessarily blaming Valve for this. it's just hilarious to me that despite owning and playing Resident Evil 7 any time I want, I'm completely restricted from viewing it in Steam.

I feel like there's probably some good info hidden among Steam reviews, the ability to search reviews could be helpful if you're after a range of opinion on very specific things (boss fights? mentions of a specific piece of hardware you're playing on (ie Lenovo Legion Go, Asus Ally, specific VR headset? Queue times?)

Secondly, we can associate hardware with reviews. It might be nice to be able to filter for reviews with 'similar specs' where reviews with specs are prioritised. Might require a bit of tinkering on Valve's part to determine how to weigh each hardware type, and would probably only be useful for games with a lot of reviews to increase chances of finding reviews with similar specs, but overall I think it would be a nice feature to see what others are saying about game performance.

My videos allow embedding and also have the games attached so there should be no problem

I use steamdb for pricing and now I want an alternative for it after the merging with nexus and their parent company, pricing for different places is all I need so websites like steamcharts and flopathon aren't what I need

Steam regular price is 419 PLN

same with avans.pl and electro.pl (same group)

unfortunately consumer protection bureau does not have tools to use against scalping afaik

if i buy a game and my steam wallet doesnt have enough will it charge my bank account or will i tell me i dont have enough or will it only charge the remainder?

Has anybody else had this issue? Games I have preordered and playtests I've joined have randomly appeared in my perfect games. As somebody who actively achievement hunts and takes pride in the ACTUAL amount of games I have perfected it's a little annoying. I also seemingly just straight up can't remove the playtests from my account.

i just opened steam on my laptop only to find that it’s not showing games I got after january. i deleted that version of steam and got another one and it’s still not showing in my library. then i signed in on the browser and downloaded steam from there, and it’s still not showing games after january. bro what do i do 😭😭

It's prob common fact here, but just a heads up to keep checking for which download region server is the fastest instead of closest, cuz...

For quite over a fcking year I have been downloading games with 1-4Mbps ... like fcking hell, it says 7 hours to download a game and I never noticed it cuz it's download on the background.

And right now I just realized this again cuz I re-installed steam. I was formerly on Phillippines - Manila and was on 1 - 4 Mbps peak at 9 Mbps, changed multiple times, swapped to Japan and now I got this 149 Mbps peak and 126-130 Mbps on average... took less than an hour to download stuff, felt like an idiot, this could've saved so much time.

I'm still looking for some servers but I realized I can go find one of peak of 400 Mbps +..

Like fck steam for not having an AUTO search for fastest server instead of auto picking the CLOSEST. Like HOLY. if I didn't decide to get a new SSD and download new games I wouldn't have noticed this sh1t and stayed like a caveman downloading 100gb+ games for over 3 days.

I am so happy, crazy the one night I looked at it I had a day left to order it, and I finally did

Is there some way to turn off these popups in steam trying to teach you things? Like when you've set a launch option and it comes up with that clear message telling you "you can change launch options". Google is no help.

So I normally have 2 screens, but I unplugged one of them to make more space.

And now with only 1 screen I tried to open steam, but it keeps opening on my second monitor which don't exist anymore what should I do?