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

In case you’ve been unable to pay with PayPal on Steam, Valve says the limitation has to do with points one in every 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 like it could 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 resolution to withdraw assist for Steam transactions by way of 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 might be out there 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, primarily based on Valve’s deliberate affiliation, is that this PayPal challenge is a part of the continued 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 primarily pressured it to take away these video games by threatening it by way of fee processor intermediaries. And Mastercard was reportedly pressured to take action within the first place by conservative activists who took challenge with sure sexually specific video games on Steam.

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