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

When you’ve been unable to pay with PayPal on Steam, Valve says the limitation has to do with points considered 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 like 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 aside from EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.”

In an announcement to Rock Paper Shotgun, Valve additional clarified that the financial institution’s determination to withdraw assist for Steam transactions via PayPal was made “concerning 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 methodology for a number of currencies.

Engadget has contacted Valve and PayPal for extra data on which areas this variation impacts, and what different fee choices will likely be out there to them. We’ll replace this text if we hear again.

Valve says it need to provide 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 situation is a part of the continued censorship battle being waged on Steam and Itch.io.

A number of video games have 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 have been eliminated. Valve later told Kotaku that Mastercard primarily pressured 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 situation with sure sexually express 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, nevertheless it’s completely attainable that buying financial institution is responding to the same form of stress.