Hi Gabe,

I’m sure you are already sick of hearing about this topic but I fear I must address it once again. I’m talking about your Youth Protection measures for Germany.

I myself am from Germany and do in general agree with our YP laws and their implementation. It actually allowed me to access more stuff easier than with the old version of the law. I do however not agree with the way you try to abide by them.

There are so many options to add an actual age check to Steam ranging from fully integrated passport checks and data storage to “just send a small packet to a service provider every time someone wants to view a page”. Instead, you not only try to transfer the responsibility to the publishers/developers but you also accept that as a result literally thousands of games are no longer accessible for German citizens.

For me personally, this is an even greater issue since I’m the Database Master for Co-Optimus.com. My responsibility is to check for titles with cooperative features and enter their information to our database. I can’t do that anymore however because especially with unreleased games most of the time nothing has been entered in your age rating form, yet. And as a result I can’t even access the store page. This is both sad and frustrating.

As such I urge you to rethink your approach to the age gate – even if its just for us Germans. I’m sure there are enough of us to justify the investment.

Thank you and all the best to you and your wonderful team!

Sincerely,

Sicarius

(Ja, diese Nachricht habe ich gerade verschickt. Wird vermutlich nichts bringen, aber man kann es ja mal versuchen.)