Since March 9, 2026, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, the media regulator, has enforced the Age-Restricted Material Codes. Anyone wishing to buy or play R18+ games there must now verify their age. How platforms implement this is up to them – and it's precisely here that Microsoft's and Valve's approaches now diverge significantly. PC Gamer used this in an opinion piece to once again sharply criticize Valve's Steam solution.
What Exactly Do Australia's New Age Verification Requirements Mandate?
The codes require providers to implement „appropriate” age verification as soon as users wish to access content classified as R18+ by the Australian Classification Board. Nothing changes for all other games. The legislator deliberately does not prescribe a single technology: companies can choose between verification, age estimation, or age inference, as long as the method is proportionate to the risk and complies with Australian data protection law. Non-compliance risks penalties of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars. More details on the codes are provided by the relevant authority on its official page for the Age-Restricted Material Codes.
Microsoft rolled out its implementation for the Xbox Store and Microsoft Store on PC at the end of August 2026. Games already purchased are not affected, but open pre-orders for R18+ titles will lapse without verification. According to official Microsoft Support, users can choose from several methods: an automatic assessment based on past account history, age estimation via selfie, a credit card, a regionally available digital ID service, or uploading a document such as a driver's license or passport. The actual verification is handled by external service providers Yoti and VerifyMy, who, according to Microsoft's own announcement, only report back a confirmation and do not forward the submitted documents to Microsoft.
How Does Microsoft's Approach Differ from Valve's Steam Solution?
Valve introduced its age verification system for Steam in Australia just a few weeks prior – radically reducing it to a single method: a valid Australian credit card that must remain permanently linked to the account. Valve does not accept debit cards, ID uploads, or selfie estimations. However, according to consistent reports from Tom’s Hardware and PC Gamer, among others, only about 43 percent of Australians even possess a credit card. A significant portion of genuinely adult users could therefore be effectively locked out. In parts of the community, such as on Reddit, Valve's approach has already been dubbed „malicious compliance” – a deliberately inconvenient fulfillment of duty rather than a genuine solution.
PC Gamer zeroes in on this exact contrast: because Microsoft demonstrates that data-efficient yet multi-faceted verification is technically feasible, the magazine interprets Valve's single-option solution as further proof that the company is not primarily concerned with data protection, but rather with minimal implementation effort at the expense of user-friendliness. From our perspective, this stark assessment is understandable, but it remains an editorial evaluation by PC Gamer and not an official finding by the regulatory authority.
What Does This Mean for Players in Australia?
For Xbox and PC users with a Microsoft account, this practically means: anyone who already has a long-standing, credibly adult account will often be automatically classified as verified and needs to do nothing further. Everyone else can choose from several options, varying in complexity. Steam users without a credit card, however, will temporarily lose access to R18+ content, even if they are undoubtedly adults – unless they specifically acquire a credit card or Valve adds further options to its process.
Source: PC Gamer
How do you view Steam's credit card requirement – understandable data protection or an unnecessary hurdle? Let us know in the comments!
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