Australia's eSafety Watchdog Flags 'Significant Gaps' in Child Protections on Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft

Australia's online safety regulator has delivered a blunt assessment of the gaming industry's efforts to shield young players, concluding that four of the world's most popular gaming platforms contain "significant gaps" in their child protection systems.

The eSafety Commission published a report finding that Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft take inconsistent and, in some cases, inadequate approaches to safeguarding minors, even as new research shows that nine out of ten Australian children between the ages of 8 and 17 play games online.

The findings place renewed pressure on gaming companies that have largely escaped the regulatory scrutiny directed at social media giants, despite offering many of the same communication tools that can put children at risk.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant framed the issue as a matter of basic rights, saying Australian children should be able to play online without coming into contact with predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist material or other harmful content. She warned that weak safety measures on gaming platforms allow predatory adults to make contact with children and build relationships before grooming them, whether for sexual exploitation or for radicalisation.

The report's most pointed criticism was reserved for Valve, the American gaming giant behind Steam and Steam Chat. According to the Commission, Valve was the only provider among the four that did not deploy a type of technology widely adopted across the industry to detect and remove known harmful content. The report also found that Valve did not proactively use tools to identify child sexual exploitation material or violent content in chats, with its existing systems mainly focused on flagging scams instead.

Roblox drew scrutiny alongside Valve for relying solely on internal datasets to train its language detection systems and for failing to retrain those models on a regular basis. The Commission suggested that this limits the platforms' ability to recognise and respond to emerging forms of abuse.

Age verification emerged as another weak point. Minecraft and Fortnite, which does offer child accounts, generally allow users to self-declare their age, the report noted, meaning anyone willing to claim they are an adult can unlock higher-risk communication features. Steam similarly depended on self-declared ages, although the report acknowledged that the platform had recently introduced credit card-based age checks. Roblox was credited with strengthening its age verification since last December.

Inman Grant said the Commission expects these services to raise their standards to identify and combat serious harms, including child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion, and material or activity that promotes, incites or instructs violence.

The report also highlighted uneven participation in industry efforts to tackle abuse. Mojang Studios, which develops Minecraft, and Roblox shared expertise on combating child sexual exploitation and violent extremism online, but Valve did not, according to the findings. Fortnite maker Epic Games, meanwhile, failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global programme designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The findings carry particular weight in Australia, which has positioned itself at the forefront of global online safety regulation. Last December the country introduced a world-leading ban on social media for under-16s, a measure that notably excluded gaming platforms. More recently, the government has pushed to compel technology giants to give users the option to opt out of social media algorithms.

The omission of gaming platforms from the under-16 social media ban has been a point of contention, with critics arguing that online games can be just as addictive and carry comparable risks for young users. The new report appears to reinforce those concerns by documenting concrete shortcomings in how major platforms police their own services.

The Commission's assessment drew on information gathered between October 2025 and March 2026, covering how the platforms protect users from serious online harm. That evidence-gathering period gave regulators a snapshot of industry practices at a time when gaming has become a dominant social outlet for children worldwide.

The four platforms named in the report collectively reach hundreds of millions of players globally and host extensive chat and messaging functions that enable users to interact with strangers. These features, while central to the appeal of multiplayer gaming, also create avenues for contact that bad actors can exploit.

The BBC has contacted Valve, Epic Games, Roblox and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, for comment. None had publicly responded at the time of publication.

The report stops short of recommending penalties or mandating specific technical fixes, but its publication adds to mounting international pressure on gaming companies to treat child safety as a core design requirement rather than an afterthought.

For Australian families, the findings may sharpen a difficult balancing act. Gaming remains one of the most popular leisure activities for young people, offering social connection and creative expression, yet the report suggests that the safeguards surrounding those experiences vary widely depending on which platform a child chooses.

How the companies respond will be closely watched, both in Australia and in other jurisdictions weighing similar oversight of the gaming sector.