If you’ve tried to pay for something on Steam via PayPal over the past month and a bit, only to be told you can’t, Valve have now offered an explanation as to why, pointing to a bank that previously handled PayPal transactions in certain currencies as having suddenly terminated its support.
Folks in affected countries first noticed notifications informing them PayPal was “currently unavailable” in their part of the world around a month ago. There’s been a steady stream of Reddit posts from folks who’ve gotten to checkout and been told this since then.
While those examples didn’t see Valve offer any further explanation of what was up, a player has now been directed to one, with the same message having been added to Steam’s support page for purchasing issues.
“In early July 2025, PayPal notified Valve that their acquiring bank for payment transactions in certain currencies was immediately terminating the processing of any transactions related to Steam,” Valve wrote. “This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.” Hence folks in nations that don’t use euros, pounds, yen, or dollars of the Canadian / American / Australian variety being unable to buy Steam’s wares via PayPal.
“We hope to offer PayPal as an option for these currencies in the future but the timeline is uncertain,” Valve continued. “We are also evaluating adding additional payment methods on Steam for the customers affected by this. In the meantime, please use one of our other current payment methods during checkout. If you can’t use any of the available options, you can consider using a Steam Wallet code to add funds to your account.”
I’ve reached out to Valve and PayPal for comment.
As of writing, it’s unclear whether this is related to the Valve’s recent policy changes regarding adult content on Steam, which they claim were in response to pressure from payment processors and other financial parties like acquiring banks (who themselves look to have been pressured by anti-porn campaign group Collective Shout) last month. It might be unrelated: while Valve have only offered the vague window of “early July” as the point when PayPal began backing out, the earliest Reddit post I’ve found from someone affected is dated July 12, which looks to pre-date the adult games/payment processor drama kicking off by at least a few days.
At least now folks aren’t left wondering if this is just a temporary outage and/or routine maintenance. Hopefully Valve can find a way to at least offer those using affected currencies more alternative options when they push their cart full of Euro Truck Sim DLC and… other stuff that’s not Euro Truck Sim DLC to the till.
Source link
