Valve Responds To Steam's Controversial PayPal Snub In Many Regions

Valve’s woes with payment processors continue, with a popular option being cutoff from its customers in various parts of the world. After having to perform a mass delisting of games featuring adult content, due to pressure from companies such as Mastercard, the company is now facing issues arising from online payments behemoth PayPal.

Users in certain territories have been unable to use PayPal as a payment option for a few weeks now, being greeted with the message, "temporarily unable to process transactions with this payment method at this time," when attempting to checkout. There have been posts appearing on Reddit and Steam forums about this issue, but it has mostly gone overlooked until now. The issue is once again being surfaced after all the attention surrounding payment processors.


Steam has updated its support page with the following, “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. This affects Steam purchases using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.” Additionally, the company will work towards restoring PayPal as a viable option down the road.

Many gamers suspected that PayPal no longer working as a payment method on Steam goes beyond a wonky currency issue. These suspicions have now been confirmed after Valve responded to an inquiry by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. A Valve spokesperson shared that it’s facing the same problem as with Mastercard and that, "in this case, one of PayPal’s acquiring banks decided to stop processing any Steam transactions, which cut off PayPal on Steam for a number of currencies."

Valve will explore payment alternatives it can offer customers, but it’s going to be difficult to move away from the payment processors that have become the underpinnings of online commerce. Meanwhile, the gaming community will need to expand its call-in campaign to include PayPal and its partners in hopes that it can get these entities to reverse course on their content policies.