If you are unable to pay for a purchase on Steam using PayPal, Valve says this is due to issues with one of PayPal’s banking partners regarding content on the platform, according to Rock Paper Shotgun. Users noticed that PayPal was disabled in some regions back in July, and it appears that this issue is unrelated to Valve and PayPal.
“In early July 2025, PayPal informed Valve that their acquiring bank for payments in certain currencies would immediately stop processing any transactions related to Steam,” Valve writes on the Steam support page. “This affects purchases on Steam using PayPal in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD, and USD.”
In a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun, Valve further explained that the bank’s decision to discontinue support for Steam transactions via PayPal was made “in relation to content on Steam that we previously commented on regarding Mastercard.” The decision to discontinue Steam transactions means that PayPal has had to disable it as a payment method for several currencies.
Engadget has reached out to Valve and PayPal for additional information on which regions will be affected by this change and what other payment options will be available to them. We will update this article if we receive a response.
Valve states that it intends to offer PayPal payments in currencies that are not currently supported in the future, “but the timing is still unknown.” Given Valve’s deliberate association, it becomes clear that the issue with PayPal is part of an ongoing struggle against censorship on Steam and Itch.io.
In July, several games were removed from Steam because they did not meet new requirements that games must comply with payment system standards and policies. Since some NSFW games did not meet these requirements, they were removed. Valve later told Kotaku that Mastercard had effectively forced it to remove these games by threatening it through payment system intermediaries. Mastercard, meanwhile, reportedly came under pressure from conservative activists who expressed dissatisfaction with some games on Steam with explicit sexual content.
In this case, the weak link is the bank that works with PayPal, not Steam or the payment network, but it is quite possible that the acquiring bank is responding to such pressure.
