Steam’s censorship points have damaged PayPal help in some areas

Should you’ve been unable to pay with PayPal on Steam, Valve says the limitation has to do with points certainly one of PayPal’s banking companions has with content material on the platform, according to Rock Paper Shotgun. Customers have seen PayPal was disabled in some areas as far back as July, and the problem looks as if it may be out of each Valve and PayPal’s arms.

“In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their buying financial institution for fee transactions in sure currencies was instantly terminating the processing of any transactions associated to Steam,” Valve writes in a Steam Support page. “This impacts Steam purchases utilizing PayPal in currencies apart from EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.”

In a press release to Rock Paper Shotgun, Valve additional clarified that the financial institution’s choice to withdraw help for Steam transactions via PayPal was made “relating to content material on Steam, associated to what we’ve beforehand commented on surrounding Mastercard.” Opting to terminate Steam transactions implies that PayPal needed to be disabled as a fee technique for a number of currencies.

Engadget has contacted Valve and PayPal for extra info on which areas this transformation impacts, and what different fee choices shall be accessible to them. We’ll replace this text if we hear again.

Valve says it need to supply PayPal funds in these unsupported currencies sooner or later, “however the timeline is unsure.” What does appear clear, based mostly on Valve’s deliberate affiliation, is that this PayPal problem is a part of the continuing censorship battle being waged on Steam and Itch.io.

A number of video games had been delisted from Steam in July as a result of they failed to satisfy new pointers that require video games abide by the requirements and insurance policies of fee processors. As a result of sure NSFW video games did not, they had been eliminated. Valve later told Kotaku that Mastercard basically compelled it to take away these video games by threatening it via fee processor intermediaries. And Mastercard was reportedly pressured to take action within the first place by conservative activists who took problem with sure sexually specific video games on Steam.

On this case, a financial institution that works with PayPal is the weak hyperlink, moderately than Steam or a fee community, nevertheless it’s solely doable that buying financial institution is responding to an analogous sort of stress.