Australia Warns of Significant Child Safety Gaps on Steam, Roblox and Other Gaming Platforms
Australia’s eSafety Commission has identified significant child safety gaps on Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft, warning that children remain exposed to exploitation, grooming and harmful content.
Australia's online safety regulator has warned that some of the world's biggest gaming platforms have significant gaps in their systems for protecting children from online exploitation, harmful content and contact with potentially dangerous users.
The eSafety Commissioner raised concerns about Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft after examining information supplied by the companies under compulsory transparency notices. The regulator said the platforms had adopted different approaches to child safety, with some making improvements but significant weaknesses remaining across the industry.
The findings are contained in a new eSafety transparency report covering measures taken between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026. The investigation examined how the gaming services protect children from serious harms including child sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual extortion, violent material, cyberbullying and violent extremist content. (eSafety Commissioner)
Nine in 10 Australian Children Play Online Games
The regulator's concerns are particularly significant because online gaming has become a major part of children's digital lives.
eSafety said its previous research found that 89 per cent of Australian children aged between eight and 17 had played online games during the previous year. About 79 per cent had played multiplayer games with other people, while 40 per cent had played online with people they did not know offline.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said children should be able to enjoy online games without being exposed to predators, sexual extortion, violent extremist material or other serious harms.
She called on gaming companies to strengthen their systems for detecting and responding to dangerous activity.
The regulator's latest findings have therefore placed greater attention on how gaming companies verify users' ages, monitor communications and identify repeat offenders.
Steam Faces Particular Scrutiny
Valve's Steam and Steam Chat attracted some of the strongest criticism in the report.
According to eSafety, Valve was the only provider among the four that did not use hash-matching technology across its services. Hash matching allows platforms to identify previously confirmed harmful material without having to analyse the same material repeatedly.
The regulator also found that Valve did not use proactive tools to detect harmful content in Steam Chat, including group chats, beyond a URL detection system that was primarily designed to block scams.
As a result, eSafety said Steam Chat had limited protections against child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity, as well as violent material and activity.
Valve also did not participate in the information-sharing initiatives examined by the regulator.
The company did, however, have processes for reviewing games before publication for certain unlawful material. For content already published, eSafety said Valve relied primarily on user reports to identify unlawful material.
Roblox Has Strengthened Some Safeguards
Roblox was also identified as having areas requiring improvement, although the company has introduced additional safety measures.
The regulator said Roblox and Valve relied solely on internal datasets to train their language-analysis systems, and neither regularly retrained those systems.
eSafety also found that Roblox's Image Auto-mod tool, used to detect violent and child sexual exploitation material in images, had a recall rate of 51 per cent. A low recall rate can mean that harmful material is being missed by an automated detection system.
At the same time, eSafety acknowledged several steps taken by Roblox to improve child safety.
From December 2025, Roblox introduced stronger age-assurance measures for Australian users, including restrictions on certain high-risk features for users identified as 18 or older. The platform has also participated in information-sharing initiatives involving child safety and violent extremism.
A Roblox spokesperson said the company prioritises the safety of its Australian community and has invested heavily in its Trust & Safety operations. The company also pointed to mandatory age checks for chat and other safeguards. (InDaily)
Fortnite and Minecraft Also Have Age-Verification Gaps
The Australian regulator found that Fortnite and Minecraft had their own weaknesses, particularly around age assurance.
Both Epic Games, which operates Fortnite, and Mojang Studios, which develops Minecraft, relied on users self-declaring their age when registering.
eSafety warned that when platforms cannot reliably determine a user's age, it becomes harder to apply appropriate age-based safety protections.
Users who identified themselves as 18 or older could access certain higher-risk communication features. In Minecraft, this included access to some third-party servers that were not proactively moderated by Mojang.
The findings demonstrate the limitations of relying primarily on information supplied by users when platforms are designed to serve large numbers of children and teenagers.
Information Sharing Remains Uneven
Another concern identified by eSafety was the varying degree to which gaming companies share information about harmful activity.
The regulator said Roblox and Mojang participated in several industry initiatives designed to combat child sexual exploitation and violent extremism.
Roblox, for example, shared information through the Lantern initiative and worked with Discord on child-safety and violent-extremism trends.
Epic Games received information from organisations including the Internet Watch Foundation and Tech Against Terrorism but did not participate in Lantern. Valve did not participate in the information-sharing initiatives examined by eSafety.
The regulator argued that cooperation is important because children and other users frequently move between different online platforms.
Australia Pushes for Stronger Protection
The findings form part of Australia's broader effort to strengthen online safety protections for children.
The government has introduced increasingly stringent requirements for online services, including age-assurance measures and restrictions concerning children's access to harmful material.
The latest report does not conclude that every platform examined has failed its obligations. Instead, eSafety said the companies had taken different approaches and that significant gaps remained.
The regulator's transparency process is designed to encourage companies to learn from one another and adopt stronger safety practices.
A Wider Warning for the Gaming Industry
Australia's findings could have implications beyond the four platforms examined.
Gaming has evolved from a largely entertainment-focused activity into a highly social online environment where children communicate, form communities and interact with strangers.
That environment creates challenges that traditional content moderation alone may not address.
The eSafety report therefore places pressure on gaming companies to improve age verification, automated detection, human moderation, repeat-offender identification and cross-platform information sharing.
For parents and regulators, the findings underline the importance of treating online games as social spaces as well as entertainment platforms.
For the gaming industry, Australia's message is clear: child safety systems need to keep pace with the increasingly social and interactive nature of online gaming.
As eSafety continues its oversight, platforms such as Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft face growing expectations to demonstrate that their safety measures can effectively protect young users from serious online harms. (eSafety Commissioner)