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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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I'm honestly tired of debating that point again and again. However, to summarize my stance on this: If parents are unable or unwilling to monitor what their child is playing or spending money on, that is not the problem of steam - or any platform for that matter. It's also not EAs fault if a child is spending thousands of bucks in ultimate team. If my child stole my credit card and did that, I would refund the money immediately and get his account locked. It's honestly tiring of hearing people demanding companies to "protect the children" when many parents do fuck all to protect or educate THEIR children.
Saying that a 30% cut is justified for everything steam offers isn't "defending" steam, it's just stating my opinion, but yeah whatever, you do you.
That's exactly why they need to do more... Children shouldn't suffer because corporations exploit them and their shitty parents.
Disagree. Not because I don't want corporations to do something, but because the ways they'd need to implement are a net-negative overall.
There's a huge discussion going on right now about age verification on OS level. That's exactly the kind of shitty results we get when we have other entities being responsible for child safety than the parents. And that's not a world I want to live in. I don't want to have to upload my government ID to any service I want to use and live in a borderline surveillance state because parents aren't able to pay attention to their children.
Or, hear me out on this one...
Real-money-and-equivalent gambling could be removed from Steam completely. No age verification needed.
As for child safety, Steam already has parental control features. I don't know how extensive/useful are they, though.
As the entire betting and gambling market is outside of steam, the only thing they could do is removing the entire steam marketplace, which would be a pretty impactful step that overall would just take a fairly cool feature away. I think it's honestly pretty cool that I can make use of skins or other items in games that I no longer play, much better than playing a game, having plenty of skins and then do nothing with them.
Idk either, but from what I know, child safety features in most platforms are pretty extensive and powerful these days.
As for how Steam Family mode works: you can lock the account behind a pin. Without unlocking, you cannot access the store or any community features. Also, every game in your library must be manually added to "Family view" or it will not show up.
So the child has to ask if it can have access to a game, which is necessary anyways since children don't generally have money. Probably a good concept and very similar to how apple or microsoft structure their child safety features.
Ager verification is absolutely not a necessity to curtail gambling, obviously.
It is. There is no other way to "protect the children" if you don't want parents to do their job.
It's not just about the children buddy. Adults are vulnerable too. There's no need to throw them off the cliff just because they passed that special age mark. Your solution about requiring id check to prevent children from gambling wouldn't do anything about adults because the issue is far more fundamental and about how the system is structured not how you enter it. Also it's not about corporations doing parent's job but about wanting something as simple as corporations not exploiting people including in big part children. You're paiting this thread like valve is good and we are asking valve to do more good by doing job of the parents while in reality we want valve to stop doing evil that valve does. And yet you will insist that you are not defending a corporation. The delusion is crazy.
Yes, but those adults are responsible for themselves.
No, not at all. I just don't think that offering a marketplace that is abused by a massive third party gambling industry is "evil". The marketplace in general is a cool feature imo and I see no reason to remove it. As soon as you introduce rarity, you will have a certain value attached to those items. It's a lot like playing an MMO - if you have a rare drop, you can sell that shit on ebay for actual money. Removing the entire concept of value from skins is honestly pretty stupid. And all because you want to "protect the children" and people with no impulse control.
In short: You want to take a feature away because some people abuse it and potentially harm people, and I just don't think that's right.
It's not about defending valve, it's about me not wanting people like you to remove good features from platforms.
It isn't. There are lots of other ways. Gambling is a heavily regulated industry. Valve just sidesteps this by not being designated as such.
I do want parents to do their job. The problem is they don't, and there's nothing we can do about that. And who suffers when they don't? Not me, not you, and not the parents. Its the children.
What are these other ways then? Hell, if you can think of something that does not include age verification or the removal of the entire steam marketplace, I'm more than willing to listen.
And all of those regulated gambling sites (at least those in the EU) require you to provide ID or a valid bank account - both things you only have as an adult and basically qualify as an age verification. There is no other way. You cannot ensure a person is who she says she is if you have no legal document. And yes, of course a child could steal it from their parents, but then the parent is legally responsible for any damages that incur.
Oh, there definitely is things we can do about that. We can punish the parents if kids use social media before legal age, for example. In germany, there are fines on certain things. If you child is missing from school repeatedly, for example, you can get fined. And I feel it's time to punish parents if their child does stuff on the internet that it shouldn't do and the parents have absolutely a chance to prevent the behavior. A child won't buy a smartphone/PC and a internet connection by themselves. These are provided by the parents and the parents then have the responsibility to set up the device in a way that ensures their child is protected.
Initially, yes. When overreaching government surveillance is introduced (only to protect the children and avoid terrorism, of course), I'm suffering pretty badly aswell since that's not a world I want to live in. And that's not a world you want to live in either.
So this might be harsh to say, but the future of society is more important than the kids with shitty parents.
They were also the ones to bring out the 30% cut mocking the people talking about it in general and when I called them out they doubled down saying that sharing an opinion is not defending a corporation. Lmao
I see so many bad takes from them in this thread and it's wild to see people upvote them. I thought the users here would know better about tech instead of getting parasocial with a corporation and thinking it can't do bad...
Yup. People forget that the internet is adult by default. A child cannot buy an internet connection.
The "protect the children" crowd, while they think they mean well, are fucking clowns. Let's start with actually protecting them, you know what the biggest killer of children is? Cars. Let's ban them first, shall we?
We should never have to show ID to use the internet, it's crazy dystopian, giving governments and corporations more and more control of our lives.
We need walkable cities and ample public transit first.
Not disagreeing though. It'd be great to transition back to them in the US
Yeah, obviously we shouldn't ban them, just like we shouldn't be requiring ID to visit websites or whatever.
And I was talking about literal casinos running on steam and not the exploitative games in there. There's absolutely no reason for steam virtual market (don't remember the name) to exist (besides it making valve money) and they could crack down on casinos easily but again, that makes them money. Also steam popularised lootboxes and they have this dumb case + key psychological trick in cs to drive more purchases. As for the 30% cut, the indie devs already have it rough. Developing a game takes a lot of effort and time. Taking 30% cut while publishers take another cut on top makes it hard for indies to sustain themselves and so they often close down. Not to mention the insanity of steam actually lowering the cut for really big studios (the more you earn the lower the cut) to keep them on the platform when corporations will do just fine and the indies need the money the most.