Please implement an (optional) age verification system

[Tomandandy]

My issue is that I live in Germany and the local laws make it impossible for me to purchase any game tagged as adult-only or let alone see the store page for said games.
Unfortunately the current method of verifying your age in steam, simply selecting your date of birth, is not considered sufficient to officially verify your age by German laws.
So what I would propose is the option for users to upload a photo of their ID to verify their age in an official way. That way users from Germany could once again access the whole steam store and steam would gain more customers as well. If this function stayed completely optional, it wouldn't cause harm to anybody.

I have also contacted steam support about this issue and was told I should make a thread about it in here, so here we are. Please consider my request.

[Start_Running]

brian9824 の投稿を引用：

Mr. Gentlebot の投稿を引用：

Which is irrelevant since they're making a solution that, legally, applies to users from that country.

I think what was meant is the final solution might very well be just not selling those games in Germany.

It's an entirely plausible scenario. Sometimes the costs to sell certain items outweigh the benefits. Now its just one possibility, only time will tell what the exact solution is.

BIngo...
As said. They've got at least a fiscal years worth of data to guide their actions and quite frankly I don't see them spending a100K to fix something that only contributed 35K

[Tomandandy]

DC-GS の投稿を引用：

It honestly doesnt affect the users as much as some might think.
I still see a lot of adults games on Steam. Cant name a single major game missing.

My guess is, it only impact really extreme adult games. So the lost sales are negligible.

The list of unavailable games started small but is increasing constantly. It used to be that only games that had explicit adult-only content were unavailable over here, so games that simply hid that content behind a DLC (free in most cases) or external patch were fine, but nowadays even some games that don't have any adult-only content by default have become unavailbale, like HuniePop for example. A full list of unavailable games can be seen here:
https://steamdb.info/search/?a=app&q=&category=888
The list already contains over 2000 entries and gets updated by the hour.

Another thing to consider is valve losing face over this whole affair. While previously I wouldn't even have considered downloading Epic Store, these days it gets more and more tempting. The recent situation with Agony didn't help that, with players that obtained the unrated version of Agony through purchase of the regular version simply having that game removed from their libraries without any word of warning. The solution proposed by the dev was applying a huge discount on the unrated version of the game, which can still not be bought in Germany. So people simply had that game removed from their accounts and are unable to do anything about the situation.

[Start_Running]

Tomandandy の投稿を引用：

DC-GS の投稿を引用：

It honestly doesnt affect the users as much as some might think.
I still see a lot of adults games on Steam. Cant name a single major game missing.

My guess is, it only impact really extreme adult games. So the lost sales are negligible.

The list of unavailable games started small but is increasing constantly. It used to be that only games that had explicit adult-only content were unavailable over here, so games that simply hid that content behind a DLC (free in most cases) or external patch were fine, but nowadays even some games that don't have any adult-only content by default have become unavailbale, like HuniePop for example. A full list of unavailable games can be seen here:
https://steamdb.info/search/?a=app&q=&category=888
The list already contains over 2000 entries and gets updated by the hour.

Another thing to consider is valve losing face over this whole affair. While previously I wouldn't even have considered downloading Epic Store, these days it gets more and more tempting. The recent situation with Agony didn't help that, with players that obtained the unrated version of Agony through purchase of the regular version simply having that game removed from their libraries without any word of warning. The solution proposed by the dev was applying a huge discount on the unrated version of the game, which can still not be bought in Germany. So people simply had that game removed from their accounts and are unable to do anything about the situation.

And you think EPic won't at somepoint get held to the same legal vise?

[Tomandandy]

Start_Running の投稿を引用：

And you think EPic won't at somepoint get held to the same legal vise?

No, I doubt any service would be able to avoid these legislations in the long run. At the end it will come down to which service decides to provide a viable verification system. Once again I'm not blaming Valve for this situation. It's entirely the fault of our politicans who are unfortunately very far detached from realitly. That being said, a viable verification system would be able to defuse the whole situation, even if costly to implement at first. Data wouldn't be required to be stored forever, a one-time verification per user would be enough.

[Brian9824]

Tomandandy の投稿を引用：

Start_Running の投稿を引用：

And you think EPic won't at somepoint get held to the same legal vise?

No, I doubt any service would be able to avoid these legislations in the long run. At the end it will come down to which service decides to provide a viable verification system. Once again I'm not blaming Valve for this situation. It's entirely the fault of our politicans who are unfortunately very far detached from realitly. That being said, a viable verification system would be able to defuse the whole situation, even if costly to implement at first. Data wouldn't be required to be stored forever, a one-time verification per user would be enough.

Again though if said verification system is more hassle then its worth then the system won't be done. Especially as basically germany is the only one requiring it.

[Tomandandy]

brian9824 の投稿を引用：

Again though if said verification system is more hassle then its worth then the system won't be done. Especially as basically germany is the only one requiring it.

Yeah I suppose at the end of the day that is the one factor it all comes down to. Well I guess I did all I could, created a support ticket, made this thread and even wrote gaben an email about the issue. Seems like I'll be stuck playing Isaac for now. Anyway folks, thanks for all your input!

[Start_Running]

Tomandandy の投稿を引用：

Start_Running の投稿を引用：

And you think EPic won't at somepoint get held to the same legal vise?

No, I doubt any service would be able to avoid these legislations in the long run. At the end it will come down to which service decides to provide a viable verification system.

And trust me, that's unlikely to happen. Porn Sites have been trying to find a solution for that for years.

Tomandandy の投稿を引用：

It's entirely the fault of our politicans who are unfortunately very far detached from realitly. That being said, a viable verification system would be able to defuse the whole situation, even if costly to implement at first. Data wouldn't be required to be stored forever, a one-time verification per user would be enough.

Are the politicians really that detatched though. If they were they'd be apt to find their jobs in jeopardy due to ticking off a significant portion of their voters....but they aren't...because they aren't.

THe parties upset by this likely make up such a small minority that the politicians are apt to gain more support than they lose from the action.

Likely Valvehas also seen this in the fiscal changes in the region.

We keep coming back to the question of 'is the juice worth the squeeze'.

[DC-GS]

Tomandandy の投稿を引用：

That being said, a viable verification system would be able to defuse the whole situation, even if costly to implement at first.

I've a feeling, you think the verification is one time cost/investment. Its Probably not. Once implemented, it has to be maintained to newest "standard".

I still have nightmares from their invoice "standard". There are so many and none are compatible. And if there is an update, it isnt even comoatible with previous versions.

[𝕎𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕖𝕝𝕫]

Tomandandy の投稿を引用：

My issue is that I live in Germany and the local laws make it impossible for me to purchase any game tagged as adult-only

Sheesh... as it was said in the German forum several times... you can ask someone from a region without restrictions to gift you the game OR buy it elsewhere than steam.