Australia’s online safety regulator has found significant gaps in how four of the world’s most popular gaming platforms protect children. A report from the eSafety Commissioner says Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft apply child safety measures inconsistently, at a time when research shows nine in 10 Australian children aged eight to 17 have played online games.
Valve, the US company that owns Steam and Steam Chat, came in for the sharpest criticism. The report found it was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely adopted across the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. Valve also did not proactively use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, with its current systems mainly flagging scams. Both Valve and Roblox were noted for training their language detection systems only on internal datasets and for not retraining those models regularly.
Age checks were another weak point. Minecraft and Fortnite, which does offer child accounts, generally let users declare their own age, meaning anyone claiming to be an adult could reach higher-risk communication features. Steam also relies on self-declared ages, although the report acknowledged that it recently introduced age checks using credit cards, and that Roblox has used stronger age checks since last December. The four platforms also differed in how they shared information: Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox shared expertise on child sexual exploitation and violent extremism, while Valve did not, and Fortnite maker Epic Games did not share instances of breaches under a global programme designed to tackle online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said weak safety measures allowed predatory adults to contact children and then groom them for sexual exploitation or radicalisation. She said children had a right to play online “without being exposed to predators” and other harmful material, and said the services needed to lift their game. Roblox said it had “invested heavily” in safeguards for children, including mandatory age checks. Valve, Epic Games and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, had been contacted for comment.
The report draws on information the commission collected on how the platforms protected users from serious online harm between October 2025 and March 2026. Australia has drawn global attention for its approach to online safety, including a ban on social media for under-16s that took effect last December and did not cover gaming platforms, and a more recent push to make technology companies let users opt out of social media algorithms.
