The Online Safety Act was passed back in 2023 here in the UK, but it has taken a few years to implement. The past month has been a chaotic period for every website required to act on it. In the gaming sphere, we’ve already seen Nexus Mods introduce age restrictions. The aim of it is “protecting children and adults online”; it requires websites with adult or age-inappropriate content behind an age verification system.

The methods vary by implementation, depending on the sites themselves, and can be rather intrusive, offering a lot of personal information to various companies. However, even if you’ve had your account for more than 18 years, you are still not of the age of adulthood and are not able to access these sites.

As Christina Tasty and Mike Brown shared on X, both have had their Steam and Xbox accounts for 19 and 22 years, respectively. But even then, they both have to verify their own age to access the adult content and social features on the platforms.

Obviously, if account age were the only barrier, they could technically just hand over (or sell) their accounts to someone under 18 and allow the new owner to bypass the block. Regardless, this is a pretty funny juxtaposition, and we should note that people don’t tend to give up the account they’ve been using for two decades.

The problem with these age verification implementations

With the rush to comply with the safety act, many websites and companies use third-party tools to do so, outsourcing them to other countries most of the time. So if you’re not using a VPN (even then, these won’t work if your store is set to the UK), accessing adult content – which might just be some games or social features – may require you to verify your age.

These can be rather intrusive and come with some great security concerns. Given that we hear about data leaks every other month, handing over scans of your face, ID, credit card, or other sensitive information is very worrying. We’ve gone from being able to anonymously browse the web to handing over all of our information to these companies that might get sold or leaked at some point.

There are already plenty of parental control features available, and these can unjustly restrict people’s access to various content, particularly if it’s falsely flagged as being so, as we saw in the itch.io game delisting and Valve losing PayPal support.

Now, Steam’s implementation is a lot less strict. With its own storefront, you only need to use a credit card to confirm, since you have to be 18 to get one. However, the problem is that they aren’t so common over here in Europe; people mostly use debit cards. Personally, I only got one more recently, and you can’t always get one easily, even as adults. Restricting it to this one method does really hurt many accounts, so even if your account is of legal age, it’s hard to prove that you yourself are.

About the Author

Sebastian Kozlowski

With a fascination for technology and games, Seb is a tech writer with a focus on hardware, news, and deals. He is also a tester and reviewer for the site. Contact him @ [email protected]