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Australia's online safety regulator has raised serious concerns about the measures taken by some of the world's most popular gaming platforms to protect young users, concluding that there are "significant gaps" in how these services shield children from harm. The findings, published in a new report by the eSafety Commission, paint a picture of an industry that is inconsistent at best and, in some cases, falling well short of expected standards.
The report examined four major gaming platforms—Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft—and found that their approaches to child safety varied widely. This inconsistency is especially concerning given the scale of young people's engagement with online gaming in Australia. Research cited in the report indicates that nine out of ten children in the country between the ages of 8 and 17 have played games online, making these platforms a central part of childhood for an overwhelming majority of Australian families.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the stakes could hardly be higher. She argued that Australian children have a fundamental right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material. Her comments underscore a growing recognition among regulators that gaming spaces, long treated as entertainment, can also function as gateways to serious criminal and extremist activity.
One of the report's most striking findings concerned Valve, the United States-based gaming giant that owns Steam and Steam Chat. According to the regulator, Valve was the only provider among the four that did not deploy the type of technology widely used across the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. The report also stated that Valve did not proactively use tools designed to identify child sexual exploitation material or violent content in chats, with its existing systems focused primarily on flagging scams rather than more serious harms.
Roblox, the hugely popular user-generated gaming platform, was singled out alongside Valve for relying solely on internal datasets to train its language detection systems. The report noted that neither company regularly retrained these models, a practice that experts consider essential given how quickly harmful actors adapt their language and tactics to evade detection. Inman Grant said the expectation was clear: these services must "lift their game" to identify and combat serious harms, including child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion, and material or activity that promotes, incites or instructs violence.
Age verification emerged as another area of concern. Minecraft and Fortnite—the latter of which does offer child accounts—generally allow users to declare their own age, according to the report. This means that anyone who claims to be an adult can gain access to higher-risk communication features, potentially exposing younger users to contact from adults with harmful intentions. Steam was also found to rely on users self-declaring their age, although the report acknowledged that the platform had recently introduced age checks using credit cards and that Roblox had strengthened its age verification procedures since last December.
The regulator further highlighted inconsistencies in how the four platforms share information and participate in industry-wide efforts. Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox were found to share industry expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online. Valve, by contrast, did not take part in such information-sharing. Separately, Epic Games—the maker of Fortnite—failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global programme designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
The report was based on information gathered by the eSafety Commission between October 2025 and March 2026, examining how the platforms went about protecting users from serious online harm. Its release adds to Australia's growing reputation as one of the world's most aggressive regulators of the digital economy. Last December, the country introduced a landmark ban on social media for under-16s, a move that made global headlines—though gaming platforms were notably excluded from that prohibition. More recently, the government has pushed to force tech giants to give users the option to opt out of social media algorithms.
The exclusion of gaming platforms from Australia's under-16 social media ban has itself been a subject of debate. Critics have argued that online gaming can be just as addictive and potentially harmful as social media, and that leaving it out of the ban created an inconsistency in the country's approach to protecting minors online. The new report would appear to lend weight to those concerns, identifying concrete shortcomings in areas ranging from content detection to age assurance and industry cooperation.
The commissioner's language left little doubt about the regulator's position. She pointed to weak safety measures on platforms as a pathway that allows "predatory adults" to make contact with children before grooming them, whether for sexual exploitation or radicalisation. That framing places gaming platforms squarely within the broader conversation about online harms, alongside social media and messaging services that have faced far more scrutiny to date.
For parents and policymakers, the report raises uncomfortable questions about the adequacy of self-regulation in the gaming sector. While some companies have made recent improvements—such as Roblox's enhanced age checks and Steam's introduction of credit card-based verification—the overall picture is one of uneven commitment. The regulator's findings suggest that voluntary measures have produced a patchwork of protections, leaving children on some platforms more vulnerable than others.
Valve, Fortnite, Roblox and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, have all been contacted for comment. Their responses, should they come, will be closely watched by regulators and child safety advocates alike. The report does not impose immediate penalties, but it adds to mounting pressure on gaming companies to standardise and strengthen their safeguards.
The broader context is one of rapid technological change and evolving risks. Gaming platforms host vast, interactive communities where text and voice chat can connect strangers across the world in real time. Tools that detect harmful content and flag suspicious behaviour are therefore not optional extras but essential infrastructure. The report's criticism that some companies rely on narrow datasets or fail to retrain their detection models points to a deeper problem: safety systems that cannot keep pace with the ways harm manifests online.
Australia's eSafety Commission has positioned itself as a pioneer in holding digital platforms accountable, and this latest report extends that mission into the gaming sector. Whether it prompts meaningful changes from the companies involved—or leads to further regulatory action—remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the regulator believes the current state of play leaves Australian children exposed to risks that the industry has the tools to reduce, but in some cases has chosen not to deploy.
The findings are likely to intensify calls for a more coordinated international approach to child safety in gaming, given that platforms operate across borders and children move fluidly between services. For now, the message from Sydney is unambiguous: the companies behind some of the world's most-played games have work to do, and the safety of their youngest users depends on how quickly they do it.
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