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Australia's online safety regulator has issued a blunt assessment of the gaming industry, concluding that four of the world's most popular gaming platforms contain "significant gaps" in the way they shield young users from harm. The findings, published by the eSafety Commission, paint a picture of an industry that applies child safety measures inconsistently, even as millions of children log on to play every day.
The report examined Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft and found that their approaches to protecting minors varied widely from one service to another. That inconsistency matters because gaming has become a dominant part of childhood in Australia. According to research cited in the report, nine out of ten children in the country between the ages of 8 and 17 have played online games, making the platforms a routine part of daily life for a generation of young Australians.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant framed the issue as a matter of basic rights. She said Australian children are entitled to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material. Her comments underline the regulator's position that online gaming spaces should be held to the same standards of safety as other digital environments where children gather.
The commissioner went further, warning that weak safeguards on these platforms open the door for "predatory adults" to establish contact with children before grooming them. She said such contact can lead to sexual exploitation or radicalisation, describing a pathway from casual in-game interaction to serious criminal harm. The warning reflects long-standing concerns among child protection advocates that gaming chat functions can serve as an entry point for offenders seeking to build trust with minors.
Among the report's most pointed criticisms was its treatment of Valve, the US gaming giant behind Steam and Steam Chat. The commission found that Valve was the only provider among the four that did not deploy a type of technology widely used across the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. In addition, the report said Valve did not proactively use tools to detect child sexual exploitation material or violent content in chats, with its existing systems focused mainly on flagging scams rather than the most serious categories of harm.
Valve and Roblox were also singled out for the way they train their language detection systems. According to the report, both companies relied solely on internal datasets to develop these tools and did not retrain their models on a regular basis. Experts in content moderation generally argue that detection systems need continual updating, because the language and tactics used by offenders evolve quickly and static models can become less effective over time.
Inman Grant said the regulator expects these services to raise their standards and do more to identify and combat serious harms, specifically naming child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion, and material or activity that promotes, incites or instructs violence. Her language made clear that the commission views current efforts as insufficient relative to the scale of the risk.
The report also raised concerns about how platforms verify the ages of their users. Minecraft and Fortnite were highlighted for generally allowing users to self-declare their age, a practice that means anyone willing to claim they are an adult can unlock "higher-risk communication features." Fortnite does offer child accounts, but the broader reliance on self-declaration remains a weakness identified by the regulator.
Steam, too, has depended on users declaring their own age, though the report acknowledged that the platform recently introduced age checks involving credit cards. Roblox was credited with introducing stronger age verification measures since last December. These developments suggest some movement toward more robust safeguards, but the commission's findings indicate the improvements are uneven across the sector.
A further issue concerned how the four platforms share information and participate in industry-wide efforts. The report found their engagement inconsistent. Mojang Studios, the developer of Minecraft, and Roblox were noted for sharing industry expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, while Valve did not take part in that exchange.
Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, was also criticised. According to the report, the company failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global programme designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse. The finding points to a broader problem: safety in gaming is increasingly seen as a shared responsibility, and gaps in one platform's reporting can leave children exposed on others.
The report's conclusions rest on information the eSafety Commission gathered between October 2025 and March 2026, examining how the platforms protected users from serious online harm during that period. The regulator has contacted Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, for comment on the findings.
The findings arrive as Australia continues to position itself as a global leader on online safety. Last December the country introduced a world-first ban on social media for under-16s, a move that attracted international attention but notably did not extend to gaming platforms. More recently, the government has pushed to force major technology companies to give users the option to opt out of social media algorithms.
That legislative context sharpens the significance of the eSafety report. Gaming platforms escaped the scope of Australia's under-16 social media ban, yet the commission's findings suggest they present many of the same categories of risk that prompted the broader crackdown. Critics have argued that online gaming can be just as addictive and potentially harmful as social media, and the new report provides the regulator's most detailed public evidence yet that child safety measures in the sector remain uneven.
For parents and policymakers, the report raises difficult questions about how to supervise a pastime that is nearly universal among Australian children. With nine in ten young people playing online games, the effectiveness of age checks, chat monitoring and cross-industry cooperation is no longer an abstract technical concern. It directly shapes the environment in which millions of children interact with strangers every day. The commission's message is that the industry has room to improve, and that the burden of closing these gaps now rests with the platforms themselves.
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