If you live in Australia and were planning to buy Grand Theft Auto VI on a PlayStation 5, you might have to scan your face first.
Sony has started rolling out age verification for Australian players trying to access R18+ content, the adults-only rating that covers Grand Theft Auto and most of the games people actually argue about.
According to PlayStation's own support page, Australian adult accounts will need to clear an age check before they can add R18+ games and content from the PlayStation Store to their library. You can do it by scanning a government ID, or, if you would rather not, by doing a facial age-estimation scan instead.
This is all part of a new wave of new rules passed this year requiring "age assurance" on adult content, from pornography, to AI chatbots, to R18+ games. Grand Theft Auto Online is one of those games, and GTA 6 will, inevitably, carry the same R18+ rating. So when it arrives, buying it from the land down under means you'll need to pass through this checkpoint.
Sony is not even first to this. Microsoft rolled the same requirement out on Xbox a couple of weeks earlier, and Sony is now catching up, both using third-party verification firms.
How PlayStation's Australian age check works
Question | Answer |
|---|---|
Who it affects | Australian adult accounts adding R18+ content |
What triggers it | Adding an R18+ game like GTA to your PlayStation Store library |
How you verify | Scan a government ID, or do a facial age-estimation scan, handled by a third party |
If you skip it | You keep the games you own, but cannot add new R18+ content until you verify |
It is a purchase gate only. It does not stop anyone who already owns the game or borrows an adult's account.
A third-party service checks you and passes Sony a simple yes or no. The genuinely frustrating part is that there is barely any evidence this works. Australia tried to gate adult games behind age checks for literal decades and failed. A recent study found kids claiming to be 16 years old sailing through these same checks on other platforms without so much as an ID, and we have already written about how the Australian game ID checks were failing before they even switched on. None of that changed just because Sony joined in. This all feels more like Sony complying for the sake of it than an actual working solution.
Besides, it only stops you from adding a new R18+ game to your library, which means it does nothing to a kid handed a parent's already-verified account, borrowing an adult's login, or playing a copy someone else bought.
GTA 6 being digital-only, with no disc at launch makes it worse, so an Australian PlayStation player cannot even sidestep the storefront by grabbing a physical copy off a shelf. Every legitimate purchase goes through the store and because Sony has spent months leaning on GTA 6 to sell PlayStation 5 consoles through its exclusive marketing deal, the very console it keeps on nudging you to buy is the one asking for your face at the virtual register.
None of this is Rockstar Games' doing, it's all on Sony. The developers themselves are mum on how its own verification will work when GTA 6 launches on November 19.
With that said, the outlook is a little grim for Australian players. The biggest game in years is coming, and for a chunk of them, the final step before playing it requires you to prove to a corporation that you are old enough to play it.