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

In the event you’ve been unable to pay with PayPal on Steam, Valve says the limitation has to do with points one among 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 difficulty looks as if it is likely to be out of each Valve and PayPal’s palms.

“In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their buying financial institution for cost 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 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 cost technique for a number of currencies.

Engadget has contacted Valve and PayPal for extra info on which areas this alteration impacts, and what different cost choices might 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, primarily based on Valve’s deliberate affiliation, is that this PayPal difficulty 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 fulfill new pointers that require video games abide by the requirements and insurance policies of cost processors. As a result of sure NSFW video games did not, they have been eliminated. Valve later told Kotaku that Mastercard basically compelled it to take away these video games by threatening it via cost processor intermediaries. And Mastercard was reportedly pressured to take action within the first place by conservative activists who took difficulty with sure sexually express video games on Steam.

On this case, a financial institution that works with PayPal is the weak hyperlink, relatively than Steam or a cost community, but it surely’s fully doable that buying financial institution is responding to the same form of stress.